What Zombie Vice Will Try to Do Next

The staggering incompetence of Vice’s management came to a new head on Thursday. The onetime titan of digital media had already filed for bankruptcy protection and fallen into the hands of (new) private equity owners, but this was a different level of finality: In addition to hundreds of layoffs, Vice decided that it would no longer publish stories on its website. Its content management system, staffers said, became a brick. The Vice website remains there for the clicking, which is a bit better than nuking it from the internet altogether, as the Messenger did when it burned out after less than a year of operation. But its ultimate destiny seems tragic. The CEO, Bruce Dixon, talks of a “strategic shift” to social channels to be carried out by the remaining employees. Vice is twin-track, dead but nominally alive.

The Vice story is about a few things at once. It’s about the struggles of the digital advertising market for everyone other than Google, Meta, and Amazon. It’s about a shocking degree of ineptitude and grift from the people in charge, who lavished one another with enormous bonuses while the business they led was disintegrating last year. And it’s now also about a belief from executives that they can wring a useful business out of a media company’s name without doing anything to support a media company’s work. Vice’s website will become a glitzy store selling no new products, a ghost ship that still flies its old banner but doesn’t have anyone on deck. And when a media company stops producing media, it’s nothing but a bleak symbol of how its bosses see the world.

What is a media company for when it stops publishing work? Historically, the question would not compute. A TV channel would go off the air, or a newspaper would stop showing up at your door, and that would be that. Vice will still just sit there. Most people don’t follow media news, so some decent number will still navigate to Vice for a time before they realize nothing new is happening. Google’s algorithm is a mystery, and perhaps Vice will continue to generate enough search traffic for a while that executives can keep taking nice bonuses for a job well done. The Wall Street Journal reported that Vice will emphasize its “business-to-business media arm, including its production studio and creative agency.” That sounds like the cessation of editorial activities and a pivot to making sponsored content that you see on YouTube every once in a while, but who knows? It does not sound anything like journalism, so while Vice the company may not be gone, Vice the news brand has surely gone to internet heaven.

That Vice’s overlords think their best move is to use the Vice name to sell services to other businesses, while ending the work that made the company notable in the first place, is a grim addition to an unmistakable trend.

Many execs now see media firms as vats of intellectual property, which they believe they can harness for some extended period of time without nurturing any new growth. Vice cannot retain its own brand power for long if it fundamentally has stopped being Vice—if it has stopped publishing distinct stories and documentaries that people are interested in, about gun violence or movies or labor rights  or anything else in Vice’s wide portfolio. That work does not continue. But the people in charge think that the Vice name and its remaining distribution channels can still bring home some bacon, at least for a time.

It’s not a new playbook. Deadspin still publishes even though the entire Deadspin staff resigned in 2019 rather than work for a boss they could not tolerate. Deadspin’s parent company hired a replacement staff after they bolted, and readership is a minuscule fraction of what it used to be. Deadspin is no longer distinct in anything but its name, and I only think of it when it gets into trouble for falsely claiming that a little Native American kid is racist toward Native Americans or it intentionally passes on reporting one of the biggest media stories in years. The prestige is gone. Deadspin’s heart and soul are elsewhere now, with the staffers who started their own website. Some time a few years ago, the nickname “Vichy Deadspin” became popular on Twitter, and this time, nobody is coming to liberate Paris.

The same thing happened when a deep-pocketed media exec tried to recapture the old magic of Gawker, a once-great site that died in its old form after a vindictive Hulk Hogan lawsuit. The revival was intriguing, and the rebooted Gawker got a few good writers. But it did not work and never felt like the old thing. Now it’s gone, its archives living on a separate site, but the plague of companies trying to capitalize on media brands without developing the product that built those brands goes on. Sports Illustrated is currently on life support, its operator poised to lay off all or most of its remaining full-time staffers this spring, but its owner has nonetheless been trying to open Sports Illustrated–branded resorts in college towns.

The sad thing is that this kind of tactic might make money. I doubt it makes a lot of money, because nowhere in the business genius handbook does it say that gradually degrading iconic brands is a way to create value in the long term. But media brands do build cultural cachet from the work their staffers produce, and I’m not sure that ordinary people are so attuned to their decline that they wouldn’t want to support the zombified versions that exist today. Deadspin’s traffic is not what it used to be, but it’s still something. It probably doesn’t matter to the algorithms that the site has not published work that caught my eye in years. Sports Illustrated’s leaders have taken a paragon of sports journalism and hit it repeatedly with a hammer, but why wouldn’t some sporty dad visiting campus for Parents Weekend at least think about staying in an SI-branded hotel? The tanking of these companies isn’t good business, but it might yield enough returns that the perpetrators feel smart.

That will be the hope of Fortress Investment Group, leader of the collection of investors who plucked Vice out of bankruptcy for $350 million last year. (In 2017, Vice achieved a $5.7 billion valuation in private markets and looked like it could become the biggest digital media business anywhere.) The domination of the ad market by tech behemoths means that Vice never had a chance to keep that valuation for long, but the company’s journalists still built a great brand. Now private equity is in charge, and the money does not believe in trying to rebuild Vice back into a thriving (if not quite $6 billion) media company under a name people care about. Instead it wants to bleed Vice’s name for whatever it’s worth. That might work out well for the investors’ cash flows, or it might not, but either outcome is totally disconnected from whether Vice creates interesting work for the rest of us. After all, making cool stuff was Vice’s work of yesterday. Its work of tomorrow is to sit there and hope enough potential clients forget what it was once good at.