Essence magazine’s corporate parent Sundial Media Group has agreed to buy women’s lifestyle company Refinery29 from Vice Media, the company said Thursday. The deal offers Refinery29 a lifeline after a tumultuous few years under the Vice Media brand.
Vice, which filed for bankruptcy last year before being sold for $350 million to a consortium led by the Fortress Investment Group, is also looking to sell its Refinery 29 publishing business, CEO Bruce Dixon said in his memo to staff. It’s the latest sign of financial problems buffeting the media industry.
Bruce Dixon (l), formerly the co-CEO alongside Lokhandwala (r), will be the sole CEO.
The addition of Vice News and Vice Fast brings more than 200 hours of programming to the Local Now platform.
Vice Media Group announced the completion of its post-bankruptcy sale to a consortium of former lenders, in a deal valuing the once-high-flying media company at $350 million. The new owners of Vice Media are funds managed by affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital.
Exclusives
A reporter for Vice Media Group blasted the company for dishing out massive salaries to executives as the once-high-flying firm staggered toward bankruptcy — yet can’t spare a dime for him to pay for court records. Joseph Cox, a senior staff writer for Vice-owned tech site Motherboard, tweeted screenshots from from documents filed by Vice in its bankruptcy proceedings listing its payments and transfers to top brass for the year before the media company filed for Chapter 11 protection in May.
The company was part of a group of bidders that offered $225 million to acquire the bankrupt media company.
Next week, Vice, once valued at $5.7 billion, is planning to sell itself out of bankruptcy. A little-known Los Angeles-based company that wants to buy it has a quixotic culture that would be incomparable to those early days of Vice, and it would almost certainly be derided.
The media business is in talks to sell itself to top lenders Fortress Investment and Soros Fund Management through a reorganization that would wipe out other investors.
Vice Media Group, the swashbuckling, youth-skewing digital media brand, is preparing to file for bankruptcy. The company, which was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017, is considering the move after struggling to find a buyer, according to reports.
Vice Media Group President Jesse Angelo announced on Wednesday he would step down to launch a new company, Checker Media, which would create and invest in news, documentaries and non-fiction projects. The move follows last week’s departure of Vice Media Chief Executive Nancy Dubuc after five years at the helm.
Nancy Dubuc is leaving Vice Media Group where she was CEO for the past five years. She just announced her decision to her staff in a memo. According to sources, she was at the end of her contract and decided it was right time to move on. It comes as the board has launched a process to sell — an acquisition of the whole company, a strategic recapitalization or other transactions involving individual assets — under the oversight of a Special Board Committee.
After Vice Media secured a new round of financing in 2017 that valued the company at $5.7 billion, Shane Smith, one of its founders, teased the potential for “hockey stick” growth and a “sexy” stock market debut. But that once-grandiose talk at Vice has run into reality. The company, which has undergone several rounds of staff cuts in recent years, is putting itself up for sale in a rocky media market — where it will almost certainly fetch much less than executives had once hoped for.
Vice Media is expecting to miss a 2022 revenue goal by more than $100 million, according to people familiar with the situation, a blow for the new-media company as it pursues a sale. The company presented a revenue target of over $700 million at an off-site with senior employees earlier this year, one of the people said. The expected shortfall would leave Vice with around $600 million in revenue for the year, roughly flat compared with 2021, the people said.
The deal would involve the creation of a new brand focused on lifestyle and entertainment coverage and could be worth at least $50 million over several years.
Vice Media, which is exploring a sale of its business, has a longstanding relationship with the Greek broadcaster.
Jonathan Bing has left his post as director of communications at Netflix to take the role of chief communications officer at Vice Media Group. Based in Los Angeles, Bing will lead Vice Media’s communications strategy across its portfolio of brands, including Vice News, Vice TV, Vice Studios and Refinery 29.
Vice Media, the digital media company once valued at $5.7 billion, has hired bankers to seek a sale, according to people familiar with the matter. Several buyers have expressed preliminary interest in acquiring Vice outright, people familiar with the matter said. While finding a single buyer would be a simpler solution for Vice, given potential issues around valuation and the company’s outstanding debt, it also is exploring options to sell the company in parts, the people said.
Productivity without pain: Breaking down silos in media workflows
Vice Media’s creator-driven approach allows its storytellers to produce compelling content for a diversified, multimedia audience. Planning, collaboration and communication across a global talent pool are critical, and at the center of all that —and more — is Wolftech, a solution that streamlines multimedia production and remote workflows while integrating easily with existing newsroom computer systems. In this video, Wolftech CEO Arne Berven interviews Daniel Elias, global director of production and media workflows at Vice Media, about how his organization uses Wolftech to facilitate the work of an international news gathering and production operation managing many different kinds of news storytelling. The interview took place during TVNewsCheck‘s eighth annual NewsTECHForum, on Dec. 14, 2021, at the New York Hilton and via live stream.
Mapping The Path For Post-Pandemic Production Changes
Executives from Fox Television Stations, Vice Media and Fox Sports distinguished temporary pandemic-driven production changes from those likelier to settle in for good in a panel at TVNewsCheck’s Television Production in a Changed World virtual conference last week.
Kyle Pleva has been named vice president of corporate communications for the U.S. at Vice Media Group. Pleva succeeds Van Scott, who departed last month to take to top communications spot at ABC News after a brief tenure at Vice Media.
A month ago, Vice Media announced a plan to reduce the number of text articles it publishes on Vice.com, Refinery29 and other Vice-owned sites by 40% to 50% as the company shifts its emphasis to video. On Thursday, Vice Media laid off more than a dozen employees, many of them writers and text editors.
Vice Media Group’s plans to go public through a nearly $3 billion merger with a blank-check firm would leave existing investors with control of the company and remove Vice’s onerous financial obligations to private-equity firm TPG, according to people familiar with the matter. The blank-check firm, 7GC & Co. Holdings, is preparing to pitch institutional investors on the deal beginning this week, the people said. Company investors — including Disney, A&E Networks and TPG — would remain shareholders under the proposed structure.
Scott leaves ABC News just a few weeks before the network news division gets a new president. He will lead all U.S. communications for the company, which includes the Vice digital brands, the Viceland cable channel and a TV show on Showtime.
The digital media outlet is reported to be in “advanced talks” to go public following a merger with 7GC & Co. Holdings, a special purpose acquisition company.
CNN Beijing-based reporter David Culver, CNN International producer Yong Xiong and photojournalist Natalie Thomas earned the Polk award for Foreign Reporting. Their win marks the first time in the 73-year history of the Polk Awards that the award for Foreign Reporting went to a television report. All previous TV awards were in the Television category. the award for Television Reporting went to Vice News Tonight correspondent Roberto Ferdman and his crew for breakthrough coverage of the shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in a “no-knock” police raid in Louisville and the investigations that followed.
The layoffs came swiftly last week. At Vice Media, 155 people lost their jobs. Quartz laid off 80. Condé Nast, publisher of glossy magazines such as Vogue, cut 100 people. And as BuzzFeed furloughed staffers at its overseas divisions, its U.S.-based staffers braced for similar cuts. For those who had been watching local newspapers struggle in the era of digitization, these announcements were sobering: Even the media business’s most savvy, innovative and glamorous players are hurting.
Vice Media has laid off roughly 155 employees, according to a Friday memo from CEO Nancy Dubuc. The memo, reviewed by TheWrap, said 55 of the cuts will be domestic and around 100 will be from overseas divisions.
An internal document at Vice Media Group lays out a plan for substantial layoffs at the new-media company’s websites, as Vice considers a variety of options to deal with coronavirus pandemic. The planning document calls for layoffs of more than 300 people in digital operations, including major cuts at both Vice News and Refinery29, the women-focused digital publisher Vice acquired last year.
Rupert Murdoch’s son is focusing his investments on media businesses that bear little resemblance to those in his father’s empire.
The companies have hammered out the broad strokes of a deal that would be a mixture of stock and some cash, and would have Refinery29 management stay on. It would add a large and female-skewing digital media company to Vice’s portfolio.
The Wall Street Journal reports that job cuts at Viceland, some of which took place Thursday, affect about 15 people across multiple departments such as programming, marketing and research. The staff reduction is part of a move away from entertainment and lifestyle programming. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.
A new chief executive hopes that the TV and movie production business can help overcome significant difficulties elsewhere in the company.
Vice Media is planning a reorganization that will include laying off about 10 percent of its workforce as the once high-flying startup looks to rein in an unwieldy business that grew quickly during the height of the digital boom. “Having finalized the 2019 budget, our focus shifts to executing our goals and hitting our marks,” CEO Nancy Dubuc wrote in a memo sent to staff on Friday morning.
