‘Like Icarus – now everyone is burnt’: how Vice and BuzzFeed fell to earth
Just over a decade ago Rupert Murdoch endorsed what appeared to be a glittering future for Vice, firing off a tweet after an impromptu visit to the media upstart’s Brooklyn offices and a drink in a nearby bar with the outspoken co-founder Shane Smith.
“Who’s heard of VICE media?” the Australian media mogul posted from his car on the way home from the 2012 visit, which resulted in a $70m (£55m) investment. “Wild, interesting effort to interest millennials who don’t read or watch established media. Global success.”
A year later, Disney had a secret $650m offer to buy fellow digital highflyer BuzzFeed spurned, despite its then president reportedly getting on his knees to beg the founder, Jonah Peretti, to take the money. They were just two of the “old media” titans scrambling to buy into a generation of new players who appeared to have cracked the code for attracting the youth audiences abandoning traditional outlets in their droves.
“Vice and BuzzFeed really had that secret sauce for a while, where the intersection of media platform, technology and content engaged with young people,” says one former Vice staffer. “That attracted eye-watering investments and valuations: for maybe five years there was a real moment in the sun, but the ascent proved to be like
Icarus and now everyone is burnt.”
Earlier this week it was reported that Vice, which was valued at as much as $5.7bn in 2017 having rejected a potentially $3bn-plus deal with Disney two years earlier, was close to filing for bankruptcy. On Friday, it emerged that Vice Media is nearing a
deal to be bought out of bankruptcy by senior lenders in a process that would wipe out existing shareholders including Murdoch’s son, James.
The news, which came after the company failed to convince as many as five potential suitors that it was worth being bought for $1.5bn, followed BuzzFeed shutting down what remained of its once high-flying news department last month and making 180 staff redundant.
The financially stretched company, which won a Pulitzer prize for international reporting in 2021 and was once a bona fide force in UK political coverage, has just a $75m market valuation after an ill-received flotation two years ago.
Much of the blame for that tumble has been placed on the overwhelming dominance of the giant tech firms: Google and Meta have vacuumed up the web advertising that was the bedrock of BuzzFeed’s economic model, and now account for 50% of global digital ad revenues and two-thirds of the UK market. Meanwhile changes to Facebook’s algorithm de-prioritising news have hammered viewing figures.
When announcing the closure of BuzzFeed’s US news operation – the UK and Australia were shut in 2020 – Peretti accused the “big platforms” of a failure to support “premium, free journalism purpose-built for social media”.
“That is part of it but I still think we would still be in the same place today anyway,” says Joseph Teasdale, of analysts Enders. “The fact is BuzzFeed
has been scrambling for a business model: the social web it was built for has gone away. It is the end of the road for a certain model of online journalism. For years companies like Vice and BuzzFeed were valued like tech companies; everyone was looking for something like the next Facebook, but they weren’t it.”
The market has proved brutal for many fellow digital success stories that boomed during the 2010s, while changing media habits have seen the rise of video services such as TikTok and YouTube.
On the same day BuzzFeed closed its news operation and cut 15% of staff, Insider, the Axel Springer-owned news site formerly known as Business Insider, announced it was to cut 10% of its global workforce to “remain healthy and competitive”.
In February Vox Media, which owns brands including the Verge, Vox and
New York Magazine, struck a $100m deal with Penske Media Corporation less than a month after making 7% of staff redundant. The deal means the owner of titles including Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard is Vox Media’s biggest shareholder.
The changes follow years of consolidation in the sector, with Vice acquiring female-focused Refinery29 in 2019 and the once-mighty HuffPost, or HuffPo, absorbed into BuzzFeed in a stock deal in 2020.
Vice has said it runs a far more diversified business than many of the digital ad-focused peers it is grouped with, having expanded into areas including running a TV channel and selling shows and films to broadcasters and streaming companies.
Credits include early reputationsetting content such as the Vice News special My Journey Inside the Islamic State and a film crew accompanying the former NBA star Dennis Rodman on a “sports diplomacy” trip to North Korea.
More recent Vice fare has ranged from Sean Penn’s documentary Superpower, about Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the Netflix documentary Fyre to series such as American Gladiators for ESPN and Gangs of London for Sky.
However, while its US TV channel has proved strong in other markets, carriage deals have been wound up, including in the UK where Vice closed its channel on Sky in 2021. “They tethered to a fading media,” says one observer. “Ultimately, TV was the wrong place to be for a youth brand.”
Backers such as Disney, which backed Vice with $400m, have long since written off the value of their investment as worthless.
In 2018, Smith, the charismatic loose cannon who built Vice from a punk magazine in Montreal into a multibillion-dollar media empire, stepped down as chief executive after apologising for allowing a “boys’ club” culture that allowed sexual harassment to flourish.
“Shane was an impressive salesman and he got a who’s who of old media to invest,” says a female former employee. “But there was a reason Vice was successful, and whatever people think of Shane he was incredible, a visionary and he galvanised people. And we lost that.”
Under Nancy Dubuc, the respected TV executive who abruptly departed the company in February after five years as chief executive, the company has sharpened focus. Overheads have been halved and gross margins doubled, with hundreds of staff cut in a drive to boost profitability and become “less ad dependent”.
The streamlining of its operation also included the quiet sale of the company’s trendy pub in east London, the Old Blue Last, a symbol of its hipster roots – “it used to be a brothel before we acquired it” – that had become lossmaking.
Nevertheless, market conditions remain tough, with Vice missing its $700m revenue target for last year by about $100m, according to the Wall Street Journal. Plans to float on the stock market via a special purpose acquisition company fell through two years ago.
“Many in media are rubbing their hands because they have wanted to see this day for Vice,” says the second former employee. “For a time there was a belief we could get back to the dizzy valuations, of rebuilding and being bought. But it reached a point that, if you had said to me: ‘Where is Vice going to be in a year?’ I couldn’t tell you, that was the problem. I lost faith.”
“Well, I have a [Mercedes] G-wagon. I’m a bitch. I’m fancy. I’m really fancy. It’s a black car. Yeah. It’s pretty good though. I like it.”
Does she go fast? “No. What I like to do is look, so I can get in trouble with that, when I’m not watching the road, I remember Mom used to tell me: ‘Diane, don’t do that. God, be careful. Look ahead. Don’t start looking around when you’re driving.’ Yeah.”
In case it’s not yet clear, speaking to Keaton is like listening to outtakes from Annie Hall delivered by carrier pigeon. She’s a singular actor in so many ways – her aversion to cosmetic surgery, for instance, and hair dye, and anything more revealing than a roll-neck, makes for a dramatic contrast with some of her Book Club co-stars. But most disarming today is how indistinguishable she seems from her screen self.
“I think the amount of overlap in the Venn diagram of Diane as a person and Diane as an actor,” says Holderman, “is unique. How she exists in the world, how she’s wired. She is relentlessly in the moment, as a person and as an actor.”
One morning, they visited the Sistine Chapel together. “To watch her observe the world is to understand who Diane Keaton is,” he says. “She is genuinely fascinated. She has all of that texture in her soul.” Even somewhere more mundane, she’d still be hopping up to examine light fittings. “A lot of people who have that artistic sensibility, as they get older, become selfaware.” Somehow, he says, she hasn’t.
Keaton is generally described as self-deprecating. That sort of underplays it. “Maybe she’d kill me for saying this,” says Holderman, carefully. “She knows she’s a movie star, but I don’t think she knows she’s a movie star. She’s just so in the moment of her experience and existence that to reflect on the larger … There’s just no time or space for it.”
Keaton was born in an LA suburb in 1946, the first of four children for Dorothy and Jack Hall. Her father was an estate agent, her mother won the regional title in the Mrs America competition for accomplished housewives. Seeing her crowned on stage prompted a mix of pride and jealousy in Keaton, who was eight at the time.
Dorothy was also a prolific – and frustrated – photographer, collagist, potter and diarist (85 volumes). Both of Keaton’s memoirs, as well as her essay collection, are as much about her mother as, say, starring in some of the most significant films ever made, dating A-listers and winning an Oscar.
“She was everything to me,” says Keaton of Dorothy today. “She was wonderful. She was my example for what you can do with life. She was the heart of everything that was best.” In 1993, Dorothy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; it feels significant it was only after this, in 1996, that Keaton adopted a daughter, Dexter (named after Cary Grant’s character in The Philadelphia Story), followed, four years later, by a son, Duke. Late single motherhood changed her profoundly, she has said, juggled with caring for Dorothy until her death in 2008, and her brother Randy, who died in 2021, after years of mental health problems.
Her books are love letters to that family, as well as ex-boyfriends, including Al Pacino, who she wanted to marry, and Warren Beatty, who she wanted to be. The common thread is the difficultly of navigating a relationship with someone when you or they, or both of you, are also loved by the public.
Today, Keaton lives with Reggie, a shaggy-haired rescue retriever and the headline act on her Instagram. She pads about in the background as we talk; Keaton enables an introduction. Is their bond easier because it’s free from jealousy? No, says Keaton: Reggie prefers the housekeeper. “She is besotted. When she’s there, I get less, right,
Reggie? Reggie is just a spoiled brat and she treats me wrong, don’t you, Reggie? No, she’s great. I love dogs. And I love animals. Do you have a dog? No? Maybe I could get you one.”
Can’t she just fire her rival? “Oh yeah. I’d like to get rid of her. No, of course not! She’s great. I need her. It’s fine. Don’t feel sorry for me. I love it. It’s all interesting. It’s never dull, ever, life.”
Keaton’s breakthrough, it’s worth remembering, came five years before Annie Hall: as Michael Corleone’s girlfriend, then wife, Kay, in The Godfather (1972). It’s a composed and still performance, all slow-clocked horror, in what is definitely not a comedy. Keaton is a great actor, wholly adept at playing women who are unquirky– even unpalatable. The promiscuous cruiser in Looking for Mr Goodbar, the racked wife in Shoot the Moon. An acid TV host in Morning Glory, an evil nun in The Young Pope. Even her reporters, in Reds and, particularly, Manhattan, were pretty prickly.
But she’s hobbled by her own persona: indelible and, to many – including directors such as Nancy Meyers – irresistible.The man who first flagged her charms was, of course, Woody Allen, who cast her in the 1971 Broadway run of Play it Again, Sam. They fell in love, split amicably and along the way made eight movies, their last that lovely freewheeling reunion, 1992’s Manhattan Murder Mystery, which saw Keaton taking on a role written for Mia Farrow – who still wanted to play it, despite accusing Allen of child molestation a few days before.
Keaton has been loyal to Allen since the resurfacing of those allegations, which he denies and that two investigations have dismissed. “I love Woody,” said Keaton in 2014, “and I believe my friend.” In his 2020 memoir, Allen described Keaton as his “north star”; the person whose opinion matters the most.
How did that make her feel? “Oh, my God,” she says, “do you know how much I owe everything to him? He was so amazing. It always was really special to be with Woody. He was great. He was everything, and he remains [so] to me. He gave me everything. He really did. Woody made it loose. That helped me enormously.”
Keaton trained in New York under Sanford Meisner, who advocated abandoning everything but spontaneity – a propitious fit for Keaton, who was kind of like that already. “She’s completely forward-facing,” says Holderman. “You don’t get false notes. She just gives in to the moment and the other actor, 100%.” Small wonder she’s popular with such performers; generous attention is flattering. She even dishes it out to journalists – I’ve never been complimented so lavishly by anyone in such a short space of time.
“Diane is sublime,” emails García, “because you can go in any direction at any given moment from take to take. I love working with her.” She says almost exactly the same thing of him. “It’s such a great experience to have had these kind of people come and go in my life and learn something, or not. Instead of being consumed by: oh gee, am I gonna, oh come on. I don’t … You know? On and on. Endlessly boring.”
Given how many manic pixie dream girls she’s inadvertently spawned, Keaton gives surprisingly short shrift to emotional self-indulgence. Her 2011 memoir revealed four years of bulimia in the early 70s for which, she wrote firmly, she had no one to blame but herself. Her new film, too, champions hardy resilience in the face of, say, having your luggage nicked or heart disease.
“What can I say except that it’s a horrible shame,” she says of victim culture today. “But we all have situations that are difficult at times. You gotta get over it! I swear to God: what did you put in your mouth?”
Confusing noises come down the line. “Oh, my gosh! She’s a moron! Like me!” A kerfuffle. Keaton comes back breathless. “You know what it was? I’m gonna tell you right now. It was a darn rock! Reggie was eating a rock. My dog! A big rock! I love her. She’s OK. I got it right outta her mouth.” A gasp of relief.
Keaton has a lot on her plate: choking dogs, photographs, wine, a recently released range of 50 textiles, some modelling for clothes brand J Crew. Right now, she’s making a new movie in North Carolina with Kathy Bates; earlier this year she was shooting at a retirement home in Walton-on-Thames with Patricia Hodge and Lulu. Why work so much?
“I’ll tell you, it gives me an opportunity to get to know more people in a different realm. And you have to worry about things like: ‘How do you wear this?’”
“It keeps her going,” agrees Simms. “She doesn’t settle in. And the energy she brings – you can’t describe it, but you feel it when she’s gone.” Holderman nods and tells me about filming Keaton and García’s first date scene.
“We shot that in basically a tinderbox,” he says. “It was, like, 140 degrees and the crew was done. Diane didn’t even break a sweat. And she was in a turtleneck.” His wife nods at him, still aghast. “Diane is on a different plane,” she says. “She had an extra dose.”
It’s hard to disagree. At some point during our conversation, midway through some other thought, she suddenly says: “So you’ll just keep thinking of me walking the streets, right? You’ll be thinking I’m that weird woman. And no one ever notices anything because they’re not really engaged. I mean, that tells you so much … God, life is so strange. And that’s why I really am fascinated by these places, because they’re abandoned, but they were something very important. Anyway, we shouldn’t talk about that, because people are gonna go: ‘What is she talking about? Get rid of her!’” She laughs. In the background, I think I hear licking.
• Book Club: The Next Chapter is released on 12 May.