“We look forward to completing the sale process in the next two to three months and charting a healthy and successful next chapter at Vice.” Lokhandwala said that the bankruptcy sale would ultimately “strengthen the company.” In documents filed with the bankruptcy court, Vice said that the timeline to sale, “while tight,” is necessary “to best position the company to survive as a going concern.” Hozefa Lokhandwala and Bruce Dixon, co-chief executives at Vice, will also stay on.Īccording to the terms of Vice’s bankruptcy loan, the company has 55 days to complete a sale. “It’s not unusual for the lender to come in and tell the debtor, the borrower, ‘You’re putting this into bankruptcy, you’re going to make a motion to sell, we’re going to put in a first bid.’”įortress sees a continuing role at Vice for Shane Smith, the brash co-founder who became synonymous with the company’s gonzo journalism from exotic locales and oversaw a boundary-pushing culture that was rife with allegations of sexual harassment, according to a person familiar with the matter. “It’s the lender coming in and saying, ‘I’m done funding the losses - if I’m going to fund the losses, I’m going to take control of the company,’” said Eric Snyder, chairman of bankruptcy at the law firm Wilk Auslander. It has been in default on that loan for months. Vice Media raised a $250 million loan from Fortress and Soros Fund Management in 2019 as it struggled to make a profit. The bankruptcy filing will give the company some relief from its onerous debt load as its lenders, including Fortress, seek to salvage their investments. And Davis Wright Tremaine, a law firm that has represented Vice, has a claim of more than $300,000. Justin Stefano, one of the co-founders of Refinery29, is owed more than $500,000, according to the filings. The company said it owed Wipro, an information technology firm, nearly $10 million. They also show Vice owes some of its biggest business partners millions of dollars. The filings say Vice has outstanding debt of $834 million, dwarfing the amount Vice was recently in talks to sell for. “We now know that a brand tethered to social media for its growth and audience alone is not sustainable.”īankruptcy records filed Monday show that Vice is made up of a web of companies associated with its various businesses, including Pulse Films and Carrot Creative, an ad agency. Mitra Kalita, the founder and publisher of Epicenter-NYC, a community journalism company based in Queens. “There are definitely commonalities in the hardships media organizations have been facing and Vice is no exception,” said S. Last month, BuzzFeed shut down its namesake Pulitzer Prize-winning news division after going public at a small fraction of its earlier valuation, and Vox Media earlier this year raised money at roughly half its 2015 valuation. Though readers came by the millions, new media companies had trouble wringing profits from them, and the bulk of digital ad dollars went to the major tech platforms. Like some of its peers in the digital-media industry, including BuzzFeed and Vox Media, Vice and its investors bet big on the rising power of social media networks like Facebook and Instagram, anticipating they would deliver a tide of young, upwardly mobile readers that advertisers craved. Investments from media titans like Disney and shrewd financial investors like TPG, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars, will be rendered worthless by the bankruptcy, cementing Vice’s status among the most notable bad bets in the media industry. The company was considered to be worth $5.7 billion at one point. Still, the dreams that Vice executives once had of a stock market debut or a sale at an eye-popping valuation have been wiped away.
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