🎙 Listening to Cyber: The End of Vice podcast.
Vice Media, owners of such famous media properties as Vice magazine, Motherboard, Vice Sports, i-D and Refinery29 amongst others, announced that it’s laying off hundreds of employees last week.
As the NYT reports:
The cuts will be the latest in a series of severe cutbacks that the company has endured in recent years, winnowing the globe-spanning digital colossus to a husk of its former self.
Some folk aren’t too happy about it, with a general sense that combination of mercenary private equity investors and overly-well paid incompetant top management are, unsurprisingly, happier to cut costs at everyone else’s expense rather than investing in the still well-regarded by many folk company. This to the extent of apparently making the bizarre decision that famed web publishing company Vice will not have a website in the future - no more vice.com, rather a pivot to what feels like a spectacularly ill-timed “emphasis on social channels” .
So a bunch of Vice reporters woke up to discover they no longer had access to Vice’s article publishing system. But someone forgot to take away their access to the podcast distribution feed and so here we are, with what will presumably be the last ever episode of the Cyber podcast, in which the now ex-employees Matthew, Emily, Anna Merlan, Tim Marchman and Mack Lamoureux going rogue and dropping an episode that promises to be full of behind the scenes truth. You won’t find the episode listed on Vice’s Cyber website for obvious reasons, but it should be there in the podcast RSS feed, for now at least.