The News
One of the only remaining high-ranking executives running news at Vice Media Group announced that she would be leaving the company this week amid its decision to shutter most of Vice’s news operations.
Earlier this week, Semafor was first to report that Subrata De, Vice’s executive vice president of news and global head of programming and development, was leaving the company after six years of running its news division. In an interview and subsequent email, the Vice news chief reflected on what she described as an evolution from “bro-ey gonzo reporting” to a stretch that saw Vice win multiple Edward R. Murrow Awards, two duPont-Columbia Silver Batons, a George Polk Award, three Peabodys, 30 News and Documentary Emmys, and one shared Pulitzer for audio work, among other accolades.
Still, she said it was “surreal to be in a room with people who are telling you that the business that was the most funded and at the core of the brand is not working and can’t continue.”
This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.
Why are you leaving now?
“There is no longer a role for me at the company. I ran a team of almost 250 people as a global news organization. And that no longer exists in this current iteration of Vice. My time at Vice was all about what I felt was kind of its defining core identity, which is news. And under this kind of new ownership, that isn’t the core business any longer.”
Was it their decision? Did they tell you ‘Hey, we’re basically not doing this anymore?’
“From the get-go, in any boardroom, or with any board members, or with anybody who would listen, I have continued to make the case around the need for investment in news, and how it can succeed as a business, and how it’s an underpinning of democracy. We have new owners. I made that case to them. It’s not as if they weren’t receptive to that and didn’t acknowledge the success of Vice News. But in whatever this business is going to be moving forward, there isn’t room for a news business.
“We built an incredibly safe and successful business. And so I went into those rooms and said, ‘Look, if you want to rebuild the Vice News brand, after this really terrible time and period we’ve been through, it’s going to take some investment, but we’ll be able to deliver.’ But we have to do right by a lot of people who, through layoffs and other things, didn’t get all that they were promised. But if we do all of that in the right way, we can rebuild this business. And you cannot run a successful news business as we did if you do not safeguard the team. You need owners who want to see that through. And in the world of an essentially broken business that then needed to really validate that trust to their new owners, I don’t know that there was really a conversation to be had around, ‘Let’s put more money into this company to see what they do.’”
Have you gotten in terms of what direction they’re taking in terms of preserving journalism? Is there going to be any journalism left at Vice, or is it completely over?
“That’s a good question. I haven’t received any kind of clear sense of what exactly the future is going to be. But the kind of journalism that we did that was resourced within an independent, robust newsroom — that’s not going to exist.”
When did it become clear that things were going south, and how did the bankruptcy impact the ongoing newsgathering you guys had abroad?
“It’s almost a year now since [then-CEO] Nancy Dubuc left the company. And that was, in many ways, a moment where a lot became much clearer about the state of Vice’s financials. That caught me off guard as much as it did anyone else. [On the news side], we were running a pretty successful venture. We were really doing very well. We launched Vice World News. In three years, it had become incredibly successful, we were creating a lot of content. So I think that obviously the bankruptcy was chilling and scary. And when I was told that we would be making these very difficult decisions around Vice News Tonight, I wasn’t aware that the company was facing bankruptcy. So, you know, look, those are really hard decisions to make as somebody running a news organization. But I was told there is no money to support this team any longer and to support this program.”
“I did try and find outside financing. I looked for pennies in the seat cushions, pulled money wherever I could, to try and get us deployed to Israel and Gaza, and to Egypt. And I tried everything, but I couldn’t do it.”
And when [the bankruptcy] was unfolding, we still had people in really dicey situations. There were people in Ukraine, there were people deployed in Iran. So I was worried and did what you always do in journalism. You start to get very creative. We’ve all been in that position in this industry: You hang on, believing that someone will believe in the work. We were at the Emmys with Vice News Tonight, winning all these awards, and the show had just been taken off the air. We just won a Polk Award this week. So my week is bookended by winning a Polk award for this incredible investigative work [on] conflict with [the] Wagner Group. And I’m now leaving the company.”
You were there for six years. What went wrong?
“I think we got too big. We were creating 120 hours of content a year based on the commitment we had from investors, and obviously, the company got very focused on, and was always very focused on, being acquired. So in order to do that they acquired other businesses. I think that fundamentally it was forgetting what the core identity was of the brand and I have a lot of respect for my colleagues at Refinery29. Do I think that they belong in a Vice world? I don’t. Vice is not unique, media companies do this, they kind of tack on other entities to get acquired. But I think a truly successful business in media is like surviving. Vice survived for 25 years as a news company, but they lost sight of their core business.”
I think the other thing is that Vice News became a media darling because it was so unique and so different. So it became like the beneficiary of these massive unicorn deals — the HBO deal, the Antenna Group deal. And those are great as a launching point. But then you have to pivot and build a sustainable business. The entire organization has to come on [one] side and agree, ‘This is our central business.’ But those unicorn deals don’t exist anymore. So you’ve got to figure out what your business is going to be.”
Did you feel that you had the support you needed from the top of the company?
“I felt pretty liberated when I got to Vice News because everyone supported my leadership. They said, ‘You believe in this, this is a good story, you’re delivering on this, we trust you.’ There was no editorial interference. Fundamentally, it was a story-first environment, and it was global, which was amazing. I ran things during the pandemic, and through some really difficult times. The civil unrest after George Floyd’s murder, and during the fall of Afghanistan. That took a lot of resourcing, and everyone backed it. We did a lot to bring our teams out, and other Afghans too. And it was incredible to be able to do that — to have a holistic approach to what running a journalistic organization needs to be.
There were a lot of things that have happened over the years — legal cases, people being arrested, people being hurt. And I always felt like I had that backing. But when we got to the bankruptcy, and there were just so many more financial consultants and layers and layers of people who were so removed from the journalism, I think that’s when I really started to question — if we’re going to operate a high risk news organization, this does not feel as safe.”
Do you think Vice was supportive enough of your team when Showtime decided to pull an episode of its series with Vice over concerns about its coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?
“They fought [Showtime] in court, but I think that we were in a weakened position, because we were going through bankruptcy. Overall, you know, we were not coming from a position of strength as a company. I don’t feel that anybody [at Vice] thought we didn’t have the backing. But maybe we didn’t have the full focus of the company.”
What’s the bigger picture here? What can be learned from the end of Vice’s news operations?
“We have to start asking the hard questions about the platforms and investor expectations in digital media and stop blaming the reporters. Like, surely we have enough collective brain power to figure this out? The platforms are an essential part of this conversation and I would argue they will thrive best in a democracy with a free press.”
