![]() Last week, BuzzFeed, which has a market value of $75m after a disastrous initial public offering last year, announced the closure of the remainder of its once highly lauded BuzzFeed News operation and that it was cutting 180 staff across the rest of the business. Vice was among a generation of fast-rising digital media upstarts such as BuzzFeed that once threatened to supplant legacy media companies with the recipe for attracting millennial audiences. Disney wrote off its $400m investment in Vice as worthless in 2019. The company was founded in 2021 and is based in New York, New York. The newsletter provides a wide range of categories such as events, politics, culture, technology, and lifestyle. The platform breakdown the news, trends, and politics in a simple and concise manner. The promise of successfully tapping the media habits of a global youth audience attracted hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from companies including Disney, which explored a $3bn-plus deal to buy Vice in 2015. theSkimm operates as a digital media platform company. Vice, which began as a punk magazine in Montreal almost three decades ago, expanded into digital media and TV striking deals with companies including Sky and HBO. “The company, its board and stakeholders continue to be focused on finding the best pathway for the company.” “Vice Media Group has been engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of strategic alternatives and planning,” the company said in a statement. If a sale cannot be agreed – suitors are said to be seeking a sub-$1bn deal – a bankruptcy process would result in Vice continuing to operate normally while an auction process is run. The same month, Nancy Dubuc, who took over as chief executive from controversial co-founder Shane Smith in 2018, announced her surprise departure. ![]() In February, Fortress Investment Group, the company’s debt holder, extended a $30m funding line to enable Vice to pay overdue bills to vendors. Last week, the company – which has been evaluating its future since plans to float using a special purpose acquisition vehicle (Spac) collapsed two years ago – announced it was cancelling its popular Vice News Tonight as part of a restructuring that could result in more than 100 staff being made redundant. Vice chief executive Nancy Dubuc exited the company in February after five years at the helm, a post she took on during a tumultuous time for the newsroom.Vice, which hit a valuation of $5.7bn in 2017 as media giants including Rupert Murdoch, WPP and Disney clamoured for a slice of its youth appeal, has been seeking a sale at a price tag of about $1.5bn. It also owns British fashion magazine i-D and in-house creative agency Virtue, among others. The company oversees a variety of brands, including the women's lifestyle site Refinery29, which it acquired in 2019 for $400 million. (It still employs journalists overseas, however, and tells NPR it has no plans to stop covering international news.) It also canceled its weekly broadcast program, "Vice News Tonight," which debuted in 2016 and passed 1,000 episodes in March. Last month the company announced layoffs across its global newsroom and shuttered its international journalism brand, Vice World News. Bankruptcy follows layoffs and high-profile departures The latter invested a total of $400 million in the company but wrote it off as a loss in 2019. Vice earlier had attracted big-name backers, including 21st Century Fox and Disney. Investors valued the company, founded in 1994 as a Montreal-based punk magazine, at $5.7 billion in 2017. Even that was a fraction of what investors once believed it was worth. The company had tried without success to find a buyer willing to pay its asking price of more than $1 billion. Vice Media says it intends to keep paying its remaining employees and vendors throughout the process and to keep top management in place. "We look forward to completing the sale process in the next two to three months and charting a healthy and successful next chapter at VICE." ![]() "This accelerated court-supervised sale process will strengthen the Company and position VICE for long-term growth," co-CEOs Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala wrote in a statement. That group, which includes Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, lent it $20 million to keep it afloat during the sale process, during which other lenders can make higher bids. Vice Media, the edgy digital media startup known for its provocative visual storytelling and punchy, explicit voice, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early Monday.Ī group of Vice lenders is set to purchase the embattled company's assets for $225 million and take on significant liabilities, listed at $500 million to $1 billion, according to the filing in a New York federal court. The once-hot media startup filed for bankruptcy after failing to sell itself. ![]()
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