Fightland

» see fightland.vice.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Fightland launched in September 2012 as Vice Media's mixed martial arts site, two years before Vice Sports existed as a brand. The arrangement behind it was odd enough that The New Yorker stopped to describe it in 2013: the UFC was sponsoring the entire vertical. Vice called it a joint venture. In practice a fight promotion was paying for the coverage of fighting, and The New Yorker's verdict on that kind of deal was that Vice's sponsored material "can feel like a strange beast, neither advertising nor regular content but something in between."

What came out of it was better than the funding structure deserved. Jack Slack wrote technique breakdowns that treated a lead hook as a subject with a literature behind it. The video side filmed in Kabul, in Pakistan, in Kurdistan with women fighters, and in Japan. Michael Hresko edited the site, there was a Spanish edition running alongside the English one, and in December 2014 Fightland was nominated at the World MMA Awards for media source of the year.

The criticism arrived early and never stopped. Deadspin ran "Vice's Artsy MMA Site Is Pretty Much A UFC Front" in August 2013, arguing that readers were not being told who was paying. CagePotato gave it a place in that year's awards and wrote a two-part series on the MMA press. Nobody involved would comment when asked. At the UFC 164 weigh-ins that same month, Dana White stood in front of the cameras in an official Fightland t-shirt.

MMA was never my sport and English-language fight writing was never my reading, so what I can judge here is the money rather than the prose. A site about fighters, funded by the organization that employed the fighters, with a Spanish edition and no Turkish one. The UFC reached Turkey the way most American sport did then, as a late-night stream with nobody writing about it in my language.

~ the dossier ~

~ the arrangement ~

Vice announced the UFC deal in May 2012 as part of a programming slate, and for years afterward the company's own network page listed Fightland among its channels. The sponsorship was never a secret in any legal sense. It was simply not printed on the article you had open, which is the thing Deadspin and CagePotato kept returning to: an essay about a fighter's footwork carries no disclosure line, and a reader has no reason to go hunting for one.

The defense, such as there was one, is that the work held up on its own. Columbia Journalism Review's long piece on Vice used Fightland as an example of how the verticals actually operated. Jack Slack took his audience with him when he left and is still making the same kind of fight analysis nine years later.

~ the friday ~

On Friday 21 July 2017, Vice Media laid off about two percent of its staff, roughly sixty people, and said it was shifting further toward video while expanding internationally. The cuts landed hardest on sports. Writers for Vice Sports announced on Twitter that afternoon that the staff had been let go, and the editor in chief said the site would cease to exist. Vice's own line was that Vice Sports would keep its URL and stay independent, with a greater focus on video.

Fightland got no such softening. Four days later Jack Slack published a podcast episode called "The End of Fightland", described in a single sentence as a talk about the end of Vice Sports and Fightland and the return of Jon Jones. The timing around it is the part worth keeping: Vice had announced $450 million from TPG in June, money it said would fund international expansion and Vice Studios, and the layoffs came one month after the announcement.

~ what the url does now ~

fightland.vice.com stopped being a site long before it stopped being an address. By January 2018 the root was already answering with redirects and errors, and the archive's copies of that redirect chain run all the way through December 2024 without once landing on anything that looks like Fightland. Today the host returns nothing at all, on either scheme.

Vice Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 15 May 2023, with a lender consortium bidding $225 million for nearly all of its assets. Fightland had been gone for almost six years by then, which makes it one of the pieces Vice shed while it still looked like it was winning.

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