Vice media to shutter, letting go of hundreds

February 24, 2024 3:30 AM

The company will be ceasing operations of Vice.com as it is "no longer cost-effective" to do so. NYT published an article recently: The News About the News Business Is Getting Grimmer
posted by antihistameme (47 comments total)

I’m convinced that any business/industry can be determined to be “no longer cost effective” once capital and profit motive put their minds to it.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:39 AM on February 24 [32 favorites]

.
posted by kozad at 3:40 AM on February 24 [1 favorite]

I thought this had already happened months ago, but I guess they filed for bankruptcy in May and laid a bunch of people off but were still scraping along until this week.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:42 AM on February 24 [1 favorite]

From July 2023: VICE Ran Out of Money (For Everyone Except Its Executives)

For instance, the company's Chief Operating Officer Cory Haik, who came to VICE by way of Mic, took home $726,068 between May 2022 and May 15, 2023, the date of VICE's bankruptcy filing. Folded into that sum was a $45,000 bonus on April 28, a little more than two weeks before VICE declared bankruptcy.

Chief People Officer Daisy Auger-Dominguez, who wrote a book on the workplace "inclusion revolution" but refused to give workers Indigenous Peoples Day off after Juneteenth made it onto the official company calendar for the first time, was paid $748,583 over the same time period, which included a $99,000 retention bonus which she received the same day as Haik. (The day before VICE's bankruptcy filing went public, Auger-Dominguez posted poolside while on a vacation in Playa del Carmen. "Room service for one on Mother’s Day is everything," she wrote in a caption for a photo of a pristine piece of avocado toast, a fruit salad, and a green beverage.)

Then there's Chief Marketing Officer Najda Bellan-White, who received $834,931 between May 2022 and May 2023, including a $128,700 bonus on April 28, 2023, even as employees who worked directly with her described her to me as deeply disconnected from the people and projects she supposedly managed. (In fact, say the word "mismanagement" three times in the mirror and you'll summon a current or former VICE employee who has a terrible story about someone who is listed in the filing as making hundreds of thousands of dollars.)

posted by mhoye at 3:46 AM on February 24 [51 favorites]

I'll miss stories like this one, from this morning's Vice: "Inside the Christian Nationalist Church where Proud Boys Go to be Baptized."
posted by kozad at 3:51 AM on February 24 [9 favorites]

VICE Ran Out of Money (For Everyone Except Its Executives)

In filing for its upcoming IPO, Reddit, which has never posted a profit, paid its CEO and COO a combined compensation total of $286 million last year.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:03 AM on February 24 [47 favorites]

Feelings about Vice aside, I think it's shitty that they won't even have archives of their writers' past work. Fine, you can't "afford" (except for extravagant salaries for the C suite) to create new stories and content, but I think you can manage to keep an online archive of all the work those folks put in.

From Blue Sky, a former writer expresses his anger at this whole thing.
posted by Kitteh at 4:13 AM on February 24 [26 favorites]

I hear similar things from my mother, who worked in the Ontario hospital system for 35 years. By the time she retired in 2005, hospital administrative departments had tripled in size, and surgical rooms were vacant for want of doctors and too much paperwork between actual treatments. From hospitals to universities to companies at almost every scale, every institution is overwhelmed with administrative bloat and a mass of interchangeable executive donkeys receiving bonuses and salary increases while the mass of people doing the actual work -- the nurses and janitors and mechanics and clerks and cashiers and on and on -- are facing pay cuts and job cuts and are generally treated as burdens by the up-aboves. Vice is just the latest example of too many cooks burning down the damn restaurant, and for God's sake it's no way to run a society.
posted by spoobnooble 3D: the spoobening at 4:16 AM on February 24 [66 favorites]

Related: Is the Media Prepared for an Extinction-Level Event? [The New Yorker; ungated]
and
A Requiem for the Culture of The Wall Street Journal
posted by chavenet at 4:25 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

the last podcast out of vice is a good listen. The people talking had all been let off, but still had access to the podcast feed, so they are doing a sort of autopsy of what went wrong. Fascinating listening
posted by The River Ivel at 4:32 AM on February 24 [25 favorites]

What happened to the Saudi Arabian money?
posted by Selena777 at 4:45 AM on February 24 [2 favorites]

> From hospitals to universities to companies at almost every scale, every institution is overwhelmed with administrative bloat and a mass of interchangeable executive donkeys receiving bonuses and salary increases while the mass of people doing the actual work -- the nurses and janitors and mechanics and clerks and cashiers and on and on -- are facing pay cuts and job cuts and are generally treated as burdens by the up-aboves.

Capitalism Too: 2 Many Managers

(with apologies to The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt)
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:52 AM on February 24 [5 favorites]

Are we going to acknowledge the moderate irony of posting "ungated" links to news articles in a thread lamenting the trouble facing the news industry.
posted by eponym at 4:53 AM on February 24 [27 favorites]

I'd like to start a company where I buy like perfectly profitable golf courses and dismantle them.

Or whatever else would frustrate and depress VC assholes.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 5:03 AM on February 24 [29 favorites]

In certain communities, buying a golf course and then turning it into housing would probably be reasonably profitable.

…so, yeah, you could probably get funding for that, and should do it.
posted by aramaic at 5:12 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

I don't know what their costs and income sources were, and the industry as a whole has big problems, but those upper management costs have to take a bite.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO salaries have risen 1200% since 1978.

Using the realized compensation measure, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio reached 344-to-1 in 2022. This stands in stark contrast to the 21-to-1 ratio in 1965. Most importantly, over the last two decades the ratio has been far higher than at any point in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or early 1990s.

If one officer is equivalent to over 300 workers (by salary), every other worker has to be incredibly productive to make up that difference. And Vice only had 1000 employees.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 5:23 AM on February 24 [12 favorites]

Are we going to acknowledge the moderate irony of posting "ungated" links to news articles in a thread lamenting the trouble facing the news industry.

The NYT has an offer for a yearly subscription at 20 dollars. If only 35,000 of us get together and stump up, we can keep one Vice exec at the level of pay they need to feel useful.

Somehow, I dont feel like it’s the ‘ungated’ thing which is the problem
posted by The River Ivel at 5:28 AM on February 24 [36 favorites]

I remember enjoying their Fashion Do's and Don'ts. And then they moved to New York and became whatever this was that just imploded. Combat coverage on HBO? Oh, and that one guy turned out to be a Nazi? Who knew? This was the most fascinating arc for a fanzine that I've ever seen.
posted by valkane at 5:50 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

I’m convinced that any business/industry can be determined to be “no longer cost effective” once capital and profit motive put their minds to it.

Everything eventually turns into either a real estate operation or credit operation.

McDonald's? It's a real estate company now. Let the franchisees make scraps on the burgers. The real money is charging those franchisees rent plus a franchise fee.

GE? 80% of their profits come from the corporate side which is, primarily, GE Capital.

Making things? That's for suckers. Margins ain't worth shit. The real money is in being a middleman. Rentier capitalism baby!
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:04 AM on February 24 [40 favorites]

the last podcast out of vice is a good listen. The people talking had all been let off, but still had access to the podcast feed, so they are doing a sort of autopsy of what went wrong. Fascinating listening

Thanks @TheRiverIvel - this really is fascinating to hear, from the snack gossip, whether the lay off letter was written by ChatGPT and then all through the serious stuff and what the future can't be

Everyone knew it was a matter of when not if, but that to me just makes it even more unforgiveable to see more and more media companies destroy their own talent and platform.
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 6:11 AM on February 24 [1 favorite]

interchangeable executive donkeys

I can't tell if that's a better band name or album name...
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 6:12 AM on February 24 [10 favorites]

Engadget just had layoffs as well and a change in focus to “traffic and revenue growth.”

I hope the staff at both of these places manage to land on their feet somewhere and make something good away from the ecosystem of vampiric big corporations and private equity firms.
posted by eekernohan at 6:12 AM on February 24 [2 favorites]

Again, Defector says it brilliantly:

Vice’s Avaricious Stewards Finally Succeeded At Bleeding It Dry
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 6:19 AM on February 24 [21 favorites]

It’s been fascinating to watch college-educated knowledge industry grunt workers discover that bosses are not in fact your friends and they do not have your best interests at heart. At best they are indifferent (as long as the business is bringing in enough revenue to pay them their massive, bloated, immoral salaries) and at worst they are bad faith actors, lying directly to your face before throwing you to the curb.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:23 AM on February 24 [9 favorites]

The real money is in being a middleman.

Airlines are just banks now.
posted by LooseFilter at 7:09 AM on February 24 [10 favorites]

If only the college-educated knowledge industry grunt workers had been clever enough to figure that out earlier, they could have taken one of the many better career options that capitalism makes available.
posted by biogeo at 7:22 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

Are we going to acknowledge the moderate irony of posting "ungated" links to news articles in a thread lamenting the trouble facing the news industry.

Bankrupt media companies and these media companies having underwhelming payment models are two sides of the same coin — and the coin is in the pocket of the executives.
posted by UN at 7:27 AM on February 24 [6 favorites]

Thanks The River Ivel for that link. That reminded me of my own end days in media.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:30 AM on February 24 [2 favorites]

> “From hospitals to universities to companies at almost every scale, every institution is overwhelmed with administrative bloat and a mass of interchangeable executive donkeys receiving bonuses and salary increases while the mass of people doing the actual work.”

Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber.

That aside I’m glad some of the ex-Vice staff got out and were able to start new things like Remap Radio and Aftermath.
posted by d_hill at 8:19 AM on February 24 [5 favorites]

I don’t think “grunt workers” in journalism have ever idealized Vice upper management, who have always had a reputation for being sleazy, aloof, or both.

Vice was always known for editorial freedom, goodhearted low-level editors, middling pay, and distant bosses who did mystifying deals, liked to party and wanted everyone to know it, and needlessly took space from beloved Brooklyn music venues.
posted by smelendez at 8:47 AM on February 24 [16 favorites]

I would subscribe to projects that the actual workers make, now that the parasite managers have murdersuicided the company
posted by eustatic at 8:52 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

I forgot to mention 404 media in my post too, also ex-vice, also doing good work.
posted by d_hill at 9:42 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

The other day my caseworker told me to look at a career website to take some interest assessments. It was as useless as they ever are (sadly my interests are still in the useless arts and not accountancy), but it claimed ALL JOBS in the arts INCLUDING JOURNALISM were growing and every job down to being a poet paid $100k!!!!
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:28 AM on February 24 [4 favorites]

Worth noting that Fortress Investment Group is the outfit that bought, gutted and still effectively controls the Gannett newspapers chain, although Fortress itself is now owned by a Japanese investment group.
posted by martin q blank at 10:37 AM on February 24 [1 favorite]

And then they moved to New York and became whatever this was that just imploded

"whatever this was" did a lot of very good investigative journalism. They won 4 Peabodys, had over 20 Emmy nominations, a Pulitzer for audio, and a bunch of other journalism awards.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:49 AM on February 24 [12 favorites]

It has been observed that the NYT has captured a lot of former subscribers from local and regional papers across the country.

There are a lot of problems with local media and the NYT is not a primary cause of them, but they are one of the few that don’t need your support.
posted by theclaw at 11:17 AM on February 24 [1 favorite]

And the NYT is a blight on our society whereas local journalist are essential.
posted by WatTylerJr at 11:21 AM on February 24 [5 favorites]

I’m convinced that any business/industry can be determined to be “no longer cost effective” once capital and profit motive put their minds to it.

I'm reminded of when I worked in IT for a relatively well known, award-winning MBA campus and grad program way back in the late 90s and early 2000s, right through the dot-com bubble and crash.

There was a point after I'd overheard enough hypercapitalist bullshit and what these grad students actually did and said and how they lived their lives when I clearly remember sitting at the help desk and thinking something like "Man, these MBA grad students are fucking morons, and even worse they're some of the biggest assholes and greediest bastards I've ever met. This is not going to end well, is it?"

It was the same kind of dismay I felt when I first saw Facebook at the same company, but worse.

And, well, now it's 20 years later and it is these same fuckheads that are now running (ruining) companies and clawing their way into C-suites and giving themselves raises while crushing and destroying companies and lives in the name of shareholder value, and here we are.

I liked that job and my coworkers but I have major regrets about helping those assholes with anything at all.
posted by loquacious at 11:29 AM on February 24 [9 favorites]

From hospitals to universities to companies at almost every scale, every institution is overwhelmed with administrative bloat and a mass of interchangeable executive donkeys

The Golgafrinchans were right about the B ark, but wrong about the people they chose for it. Like, hairdressers, documentary producers, even creative marketing execs, those are people who actually do stuff. And then you've got the folks at the very tippy-top who just make everything worse while they suck up all the money. Leave the telephone sanitizers alone and fire the corporate heads off into space.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 11:30 AM on February 24 [16 favorites]

I think the ultimate fate of the Golgafrinchians proves your point, Ursula. They were wiped out by a plague originally contracted from a dirty telephone.
posted by notoriety public at 1:36 PM on February 24 [6 favorites]

...for God's sake it's no way to run a society.

Pretty much applies to all of corporate America.

Buhbye Vice, it was good ta know you.
posted by BlueHorse at 3:42 PM on February 24

Vice also, under their technology news sub-brand Motherboard, ran an imprint for Science Fiction short stories called Terraform
posted by vibratory manner of working at 9:09 PM on February 24 [1 favorite]

If only the college-educated knowledge industry grunt workers had been clever enough to figure that out earlier, they could have taken one of the many better career options that capitalism makes available.

I think the point is that all these nice children from nice upper-middle-class homes in Seattle (*) thought they were capitalism's special little boys and girls and as such didn't need such grubby things as unions or leftist politicians. Oopsy!!!

I suspect the Mefi archives would yield a good study of this attitude.

(*) Not a uniquely West Coast phenomenon, of course. The East Coast upper middle class has its own forms of softness. But it seems like you could get further as a coder than as a lawyer or investment banker while maintaining your denial of the rapacity of our world.
posted by praemunire at 9:09 AM on February 25

I think the point is that all these nice children from nice upper-middle-class homes in Seattle (*) thought they were capitalism's special little boys and girls and as such didn't need such grubby things as unions or leftist politicians. Oopsy!!!

Is there...a lot of evidence that these people don't want unions or leftist politicians? A lack of success in getting unions going and electing leftist politicians, sadly, doesn't really reflect on the will of the grunt workers to have those things, in a society where voting don't do shit and anti-union laws are on all the books. Wasn't there just a publication that managed to unionize and was then immediately shut down in an act of basically pure naked retaliation?

I mean I guess I don't know about tech workers, but if we're talking about journalism they're not usually a right-of-center bunch.

It probably doesn't matter, I just don't like to see people slammed for not caring when what actually happened was they just plain got their asses kicked.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:05 PM on February 25 [3 favorites]

Cory Doctorow has a take on the shuttering of Vice.
posted by fimbulvetr at 2:24 PM on February 25 [2 favorites]

Is there...a lot of evidence that these people don't want unions or leftist politicians?

I think there is a lot of evidence that this kind of rhetoric was quite common among that class 10-20 years ago. I heard it constantly. I wasn't on here back then, but I would bet a decent amount you could excavate examples from the archives fairly readily. The undertones (when only undertones) were very classist.

I don't want anyone to suffer, particularly, coder or otherwise, but I am not so noble as to be totally above noting when people who thought they were too special to need solidarity suddenly find out they're just like the rest of us, like flies to wanton boys, etc.
posted by praemunire at 3:00 PM on February 25 [3 favorites]

I’m a little unclear on how this thread about East Coast media layoffs become about West Coast coders. Journalists and media grunts, for their part, certainly have shown interest in labor organization in recent years, which makes sense because they have been paid and treated poorly for decades.

But it seems like you could get further as a coder than as a lawyer or investment banker while maintaining your denial of the rapacity of our world.

Are the lawyers and investment bankers unionizing and supporting leftist politicians? In my experience software people of my generation have become a bit more class-consciousness-curious in the same way and for the same reasons that a lot of professional/upper-middle-class types have. But we are also coming off of a boom that pushed Big Tech compensation into Big Law range, so I don’t think it’s terribly surprising that it was hard to get them to take the idea of a union to heart.
posted by atoxyl at 9:26 PM on February 25 [6 favorites]