
It’s a sad day for millennial media: Vice is no longer publishing content on Vice.com.
According to Vice CEO Bruce Dixon, the company will also be eliminating “hundreds of jobs.” The exact number hasn’t been announced, but hundreds of jobs is a large amount for a company that has fewer than 1,000 employees.
“After careful consideration and discussion with the board, we have decided to make some fundamental changes to our strategic vision at Vice,” Dixon said in an email to staff Thursday afternoon. “It is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously.”
Instead, Dixon explained, it will make a full transition to a studio model, where it will partner with other media companies to distribute its content.
For a few shining moments in the 2010s, it looked like Vice, which began life as a magazine in Montreal, would save journalism. It went from scrappy, irreverent indie darlings, to having its own cable network and being valued in the billions. But alas, all of that has changed now.
According to the New York Times, “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.” There had been hope that Fortress Investment Group, which purchased the company last year, would reinvest in the company, but instead they seem to have opted for making big cuts.