“Making do with less” has become a theme at Vice, as executives try to find a willing buyer. reeveswiedeman reports on the once-swaggering company's next pivot
Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photos: Getty Images On the third Friday in August, Jesse Angelo, the longtime News Corp executive hired in June as president of global news and entertainment at Vice Media, gathered the staff of the company’s nightly news show to deliver their fate.
Those who remained were now learning that the show would be fundamentally changing, and Angelo did his best to temper the disappointment. HBO had been a “lovely garden,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting shared with New York, but “it was an extremely walled garden,” and they would now be able to share their content more easily online. Most significantly, the team would no longer be producing just a half-hour show: All three hours of the network’s prime-time block, from 8–11 p.m.
“Making do with less” has become a theme not just at Vice News, but across the company. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Vice was on track to lose $50 million and to post revenues of between $600 and $650 million — less than it made two years earlier, and far less than the $1 billion Shane Smith, the company’s co-founder, had promised it would be making by now. In February, Vice laid off 10 percent of its employees.
This departmental consolidation is occurring under Angelo, a seasoned news executive — if not, precisely, in the Vice mold.
But the remnants of Old Vice linger, and many employees I spoke to found themselves asking: Where’s Shane? Smith has been largely quiet since handing over the reins to Dubuc last spring and elevating himself to executive chairman, although in May, at the prompting of the Vice News team, he held several off-the-record dinners with congressmen and staffers in D.C.
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