Vice News is not one to shy away from headlines. Chances are, you may have heard of its now-infamous manga documentary from November 2022 slandering Japanese creators. Vice Media Group LLC, once the biggest success story in digital media, now faces financial collapse. They filed for bankruptcy on May 15, 2023.
Vice Media, once a digital video upstart formerly valued at nearly $6 billion, has filed for bankruptcy protection. https://t.co/4trODpCPid
— CBS News (@CBSNews) May 15, 2023
As reported by various sources, including USA Today, Vice had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a flurry of speculation. It would ease its sale to a consortium of creditors over the next 2-3 months to reorganize the entire media group until it got back on its feet. While this means that it will technically keep running its operations in the meantime, as opposed to a Chapter 7 “liquidation,” it’s cold comfort for a company that, at one point, was valued at $5.7 billion.
The group of lenders, including Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital agreed to provide $225 million in the form of a credit bid for “substantially all of the company’s assets,” the company said in a statement…
…”This accelerated court-supervised sale process will strengthen the Company and position Vice for long-term growth, thereby safeguarding the kind of authentic journalism and content creation that makes Vice such a trusted brand for young people and such a valued partner to brands, agencies and platforms,” Vice’s Co-Chief Executive Officers Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala said in the statement.
“Many, many things went wrong,” Ben Smith, the former top BuzzFeed News editor, told Jon Favreau on his Offline podcast, noting in something of an understatement that “social media wasn’t going to work out the way we thought it was”. (Disclosure: I was recruited to succeed Smith at BuzzFeed News; I dropped out of the running early on.)In fact, said Smith, whose new book, Traffic, traces the rise and decline of the digital-news dream, “the Internet itself is kind of falling apart”. That may be overstating it, but Twitter users – and hundreds of laid-off journalists – would find it hard to disagree.
Attention over Quality
The process of turning attention -> intention is so much more than just diversifying your revenue streams.Attention is cheap, but flimsy. Attention models are fragile, and can’t scale.Intention takes consistency and quality, but creates true (and truly invested) fans.
So what do these mean from an anime or manga fan’s lens? Perhaps the fallout of Hanako Montgomery’s documentary, which J-List‘s Justin James has covered in detail, may help. Despite the sensationalism and outrage Vice News’ hoped to exploit for its benefit, these were far from enough to plug the growing holes in its once-untouchable façade. As early as January 20, 2023, the New York Times noted the company had become so unprofitable that its directors were already looking to sell whatever they could to stay afloat. This eventually culminated in Vice News Tonight shutting down on April 27, with over a hundred laid off. If anything, the backlash against that video, even long after it came out, seems representative of Vice’s failure to get the “right” kind of attention. As does the audiences’ dwindling tolerance for the company’s brand of journalism.
Granted, it’s not quite over just yet. Just as Vice’s bankruptcy has been months in the making, it might take some time before the full ramifications could be felt. No matter how much the company tries to downplay them. If there’s one silver lining, perhaps Japanese creators and their fans had the last laugh. You can also have the last laugh by checking out our Madoka Magica products in the J-List store! What are your thoughts on this? Feel free to leave your comments below!
