The last couple years have been a tough time to be in the news industry. It’s not generally a good sign when you go from reporting the news, to BEING the news. That’s precisely what’s been happening though as we recently reported that BuzzFeed News would be shutting down, despite being a Pulitzer Prize winning outlet. Now it appears that an even bigger entity, Vice, could soon be exploring the possibility of bankruptcy after failing to find a buyer.
Vice Media is bigger than you might realize if you’re just familiar with their online presence. Originating as a Canadian magazine in 1994, the company has steadily grown overtime to enter the realms of digital media, television networks, broadcast programming, and documentary film making. “Vice News Tonight,” for example, was a daily program that ran on HBO from 2016-2019. And while HBO cut ties with them around that time, “Vice News Tonight” continued on it’s own Vice television channel. Perhaps as a sign of things to come though, the show was cancelled in April, with the last episode set to run later this month.
Given that Vice has a number of different publications under its belt, a bankruptcy filing could help them reorganize under Chapter 11. They could focus on core competency, sell off some assets, and return with a streamlined and successful business model. That would hardly be any consolation though to the number of jobs that have already been cut. All of this is particularly shocking though considering that only a few years ago, the value of Vice was reportedly set at over $5 billion. What would cause such a drastic shift in fortune?
You could cite a lot of issues for the recent troubles of various news outlets, since it’s not just Vice that’s having problems. Obviously there have been a number of economic problems coming out of the pandemic and the diverse options for informational content online make it harder for some operations to draw in large audiences. Even before the pandemic there were issues with the “pivot to video” controversy, which suggested audiences were more interested in video content than written content, pushing journalist outlets to hire video teams only to terminate them later when it turns out, people actually did still want written content. (See what happened with Cracked.com for an example of that)
Given everything that Vice has under its corporate umbrella, this would be one of the bigger media fallouts in some time. In October of 2022 we saw where Comcast shut down the revival of G4 but that was just a relatively small division of a much larger company. Even with BuzzFeed shuttering their news division, it wasn’t like the entire company was going into bankruptcy. So for Vice to have to explore this option as they’re unable to pay their debts might be a bad sign for media and news companies overall.
As of the time of this writing the company has not yet officially filed for Chapter 11 and is still seeking a buyer. We’ll update things as more news becomes available.
