Vice plans to lay off hundreds of employees next week and stop publishing on Vice.com, according to a memo sent to staffers by Bruce Dixon, the Vice Media chief.
On Friday, Dixon confirmed that “several hundred” staffers would be laid off and that the brand “will no longer publish content on vice.com”. He said the company is transitioning to a “studio model”.
“This decision was not made lightly,” Dixon wrote, adding that those affected will be “notified about next steps early next week”.
The memo also noted that Refinery29, another media brand owned by Vice, “will continue to operate as a standalone diversified digital publishing business, creating engaging, social first content”.
“As you know, we are in advanced discussions to sell this business, and we are continuing with that process. We expect to announce more on that in the coming weeks,” Dixon said.
Reports of the layoffs come less than a year after the media company was rescued from bankruptcy by being acquired by a consortium of buyers from Fortress Investment Group.
The Hollywood Reporter revealed on Thursday that multiple employees at Vice were concerned that the company was considering closing down its news website. Various Vice editors reportedly met with staff members and told them that management has yet to provide clarity on the situation.
Speaking to staff members in a conference call on Thursday, Josh Visser, the Vice News executive editor, said that he had asked the company’s executives to clarify emerging rumors of a potential website closure but had not yet received a response.
“I don’t know more than you guys besides being able to read faces and notice who is not replying to my messages,” Visser said, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Visser described the situation as “very upsetting”, adding: “Our website and our work being pulled down would be completely reprehensible … I cannot even understand any business reasons why you would do something like that,” the Hollywood Reporter reports.
After previous cuts to several shows and dozens of layoffs in November last year, Vice Union said on Twitter/X: “We can no longer express shock and surprise that VICE has determined its only way forward is to lay people off.
“As has been the case in previous layoffs, VICE has once again decided to let go of the very same people who have worked tirelessly to turn it into a respected, award-winning media company.”
Writing on X on Thursday, Vice senior staff writer Anna Merlan said: “Working at Vice has been … so interesting and I will certainly look back on it … I think the ruckus today and the digging by media reporters encouraged a lot more transparency and more quickly than the company would have otherwise done, so thank you all for that.”
In recent weeks, the media industry has gone through sweeping layoffs, with major cuts at NowThis and the Intercept. In a statement last week, the NowThis Union revealed that nearly 50% of the workforce was laid off while the Intercept cut 15 positions.
Last fall, Condé Nast, which owns multiple outlets including the New Yorker, Vogue, Wired, Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest, said that it was laying off 5% of its employees. Similarly, Vox Media said that it was cutting approximately 4% of its workforce after slashing its headcount by 7% at the beginning of 2023.
