Weekly Digest: Vice’s bankruptcy, decline of print

American digital media company Vice Media filed for bankruptcy on Monday. The process “is likely to result in the sale of the company to Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management for $225 million”, Vice itself reports.

The news isn’t unexpected – in fact, rumours of the firm’s impending bankruptcy had been circulating for weeks – and bankruptcy filing, of course, doesn’t mean the organisation is shutting down. However, Vice Media’s bankruptcy is a symbol of the broader faltering of new digital media companies that were thought to disrupt the traditional media landscape a decade ago, as exemplified by the recent shutdown of BuzzFeed News.

In 2017, Vice Media was valued at $5.7 billion, a figure that has come down dramatically since then. As The New York Times writes, Vice Media “[used to sell] advertisers and investors on its ability to reach young millennials who were hungry for an alternative to its corporate rivals, delivering you-are-there dispatches from North Korea and Liberia without the decorum of the mainstream news media.” However, the promise of the social web didn’t monetise, and legacy media organisations (like The New York Times itself) caught up.

News UK, one of the UK’s biggest news companies that publishes The Times, The Sunday Times and The Sun, is set to close one of its three printing plants located in Knowsley. Titles printed there will be produced in the two other locations – Eurocentral in Glasgow and Broxbourne in Hertfordshire. The company said that “[the] proposal is subject to consultation with impacted staff” (200 people by Printweek’s estimate).

While News UK continues to operate all of its print newspapers, the closure is a sign of the broad decline in print circulation. As Press Gazette notes, this closure is part of the broader trend in recent years across the UK – “DMG Media closed its site in Hillsea, Portsmouth in June last year, Reach announced the closure of a Teesside plant in December (after closing two others two years earlier), the FT shut its site in Bow in March 2022 and Archant closed its last presses in 2019.”

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