Vice’s New Owners Prepare to Slash What’s Left of Its Work Force
Executives at Vice Media are planning to lay off several hundred of its more than 900 employees over the next week, eliminating staff from its digital publishing division, according to a company memo sent to staff on Thursday from Bruce Dixon, the chief executive.
The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self. Over the past half-decade, Vice has had near annual layoffs and mounting losses, and has filed for bankruptcy, making it the poster child for the battered digital-media industry.
When Vice emerged from bankruptcy last year, some observers hoped its new owners — a consortium led by the private-equity firm Fortress Investment Group — would reinvest to return the company to growth.
Instead, Fortress has decided to make sweeping cuts, as part of an attempt to stem the endless tide of red ink. The company is planning to inform employees of its new business strategy in the next week.
Mr. Dixon also said in the memo, which was seen by The New York Times, that the company would no longer publish on Vice.com.
“As we navigate the ever-evolving business landscape, we need to adapt and best align our strategies to be more competitive in the long-term,” he wrote. He also said Vice was in advanced talks to sell Refinery29, the company’s women-focused publishing division.
The layoffs come amid gale-force headwinds for the entire media industry. Over the past year, almost every major news publisher, including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Vox Media and The Los Angeles Times, has made cuts to its operations. Web traffic to news organizations has declined precipitously as users are spending time with nontraditional media forms like TikTok and Instagram.
Vice was in rough shape before this planned spate of cuts. The company has been periodically put up for sale over the last two years, as long-promised profits failed to materialize. As the business environment for digital media became increasingly precarious, executives bet on big, elaborate content deals for clients like the cigarette manufacturer Philip Morris International and Antenna, a Greek media company.
When the deal with Antenna was terminated last year, Vice’s financial situation became desperate, and the company spiraled into bankruptcy. But even after a court-supervised sale process, the company struggled to attain profitability, and bills continued to pile up.
Founded more than two decades ago as a punk magazine in Montreal, Vice rode a rising tide of investment from media heavyweights like A&E Networks, Disney and the private-equity firm TPG to a valuation of $5.7 billion. But the company suffered a dramatic reversal of fortune and struggled to live up to its eye-popping valuation as the market for digital media cratered, leaving its financial backers and employees without a return on their investment.
