Show notes
The past two episodes of Theory of Change have focused on dating and sex, and I wanted to end the miniseries with a conversation that brings in the topic of media as well. Not just because the next episode arc we'll be doing is about the state of journalism, but also because media have played an important role in how people meet and form connections.It seems forever ago now in 2024, but for many years, one of the ways that people went on dates was through a local newspaper and their personal ads. You’ve likely heard of them, even if you never used them: “Single white female seeking man for tennis and deep conversations.” There were many other types of classified ad as well: “Got a trip to Spain coming up? Learn Spanish from the comfort of your own home with our great tutors!” And so on. Millions of short messages like these were the original social media feeds for communities, the place to figure out what the regular people around us were up to and what they were looking for.And as it happened, some people were looking for sex workers. But strippers, escorts, and other such professionals weren't allowed to advertise in the respectable daily newspaper, so instead, they turned to their local alternative newspaper. In their heyday, alt-weeklies, as they were often called, were an industry that brought in hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They also produced a lot of great journalism—and the first real challenge to the bland and cowardly approach that even today dominates so much of mainstream media.The story of the alternative weekly newspaper and how the former “counterculture” became the mainstream is one that Sam Eifling and his co-producers tell in a new podcast for Audible called “Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website” that’s definitely worth a listen.The transcript of our conversation is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the complete text. The video of this episode is also available.Photo montage: Flux. CC by SA.Theory of Change is part of the Flux Media network, please support our work and get more content like this by subscribing on Patreon or Substack.Related Content* Dating in the present age has become quite the mess, how did it happen?* How the Christian right is using sex to sell religion* CNN and Fox are having very different identity crises* Editorial cartooning is under threat in the age of the meme* The rise of Donald Trump reshuffled the right-wing media businessAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:27 — How Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey’s New Times revolutionized newspaper classified ads and later online adult ads19:31 — How dating and hooking up via text advertisements worked30:09 — Alt-weeklies were the first real challengers to the false promise of “objective” news reporting36:24 — Before the “counterculture” won, libertarians thought they were on the political left47:04 — How Backpage replaced alt-weeklies for sex workers trying to be safe52:47 — The bipartisan prosecution of Backpage’s founders01:05:57 — The personal story of a john named John01:14:41 — ConclusionAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been corrected. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I think a lot of people have never heard of Backpage at this point, whether being too young for it or not being [00:04:00] interested in those types of services. So why don't we start off by describing what Backpage was, and then we can get to where it came from.SAM EIFLING: Sure. The simplest way to describe Backpage is that it was a knockoff of Craigslist, like a pure just, straight up Craigslist knockoff that eventually, because of the attitudes and past sort of business expertise of the owners, really became the go to red light district for sex ads on the internet for the better part of a decade.It was a company that grew out of a company I used to work for. It was a newspaper company called New Times Inc. When when I started working there in the early two thousands, it was the biggest chain of alternative news weeklies in America. So these papers you would get, they were free. They were paid for by advertising display ads, which are usually what companies take out and classified ads, which are what individuals mostly take out.Classified ads could be [00:05:00] selling your couch, selling your car, a help wanted ad. And part of the New Times model for a long time was to welcome and encourage ads that had a sort of a grey zone of sexuality, right? So it could be massages, it could be escorts. I'm sure there were working prostitutes advertising at the Backpages, Backpages of New Times papers and probably helping to pay my salary and that of other reporters. It really wasn't our business to focus on at the time. But as that model fell apart, as Craigslist came in, especially, and started disrupting the entire online classified ecosystem, and these papers started wondering how are we going to get the money to pay for the journalism, executives at New Times came up with the idea of essentially running the same style of ads that they ran in the papers online in a Craigslist like format.And over the years, that became increasingly [00:06:00] a lightning rod for attention and negative attention, especially when it came to people who would go to the media or appear in in different venues and say: “I was trafficked via Backpage. Someone held me against my will and advertised me as a sort of basically a prostitute or at that point, really a victim of a crime of sex trafficking on Backpage.”And with a few of those accusations out of millions and millions of ads, there became this groundswell. The groundswell led to activism. The activism fed into political pressure. Political pressure led to the arrest of the main characters in our show, Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin. Years ago it started this chain of, alternative news weeklies, and now we're being arrested by the FBI and charged with essentially facilitating prostitution at probably the largest scale that's ever [00:07:00] been, accused in the history of the U. S. government. They were basically saying, you guys are, in the biggest pimps in the history of of America.And they were thrown in jail and taken to trial. And so that's sort of where we picked up is, the beginning of the show is the arrest of, of Lacey and Larkin, and by the end we're, we're at a, a federal trial to hear, to hear the government make their case against, against Backpage and the Backpage executives.How Jim Larkin and Mike Lacey's New Times revolutionized classified ads and weekly newspapersSHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, it's a, and it's a story that. It's a, it's a really important story more than you would think. I think for people who, like, Oh, I would never place a adult classified ad, or, I would never go to a prostitute or whatever.There's, there's some, a lot of real implications to all this, both where they came from, and, and the case against them.So let's maybe step back then to the beginning here. In 2024, it's like, It seems a world removed in many ways, this industry that these, these guys really kind of started [00:08:00] and of alternative newspapers.And a lot of this, I mean, it really got started with the village voice out of out of New York City in the 1950s, and then kind of, there were a bunch of, Sort of self styled underground newspapers that were kind of run by anti war college students primarily in the 60s and 70s. And then it became a business with these guys.So, why don't you talk, tell us about that and what they were doing. What they, what did they discover that people had missed certainly.EIFLING: Yeah, it is. it's to me, I'm born, I think age is a big part of this. So I can just say born in 1980.And when was a college student thinking about getting into newspapers or journalism at all, newspapers were still really king newspapers and magazines. And I think a lot, as a lot of did probably in that age. before there were blogs, before there were podcasts, you might think about starting your own paper, [00:09:00] right?It was, it was something you could, you could write, you could print, you could, you could report, you could have a voice, you could raise hell and distribute it. And that was a model that had been around for a long time.In the case of the Village Voice, it started in the mid fifties in New York and sort of set the template, right? Which was a paper that was adversarial to the entrenched power structures in the city, including the existing media, which I think was a big part of what, I anybody now who, gets or a lot of I don't know how many vlogs are picking apart the mainstream media.Well, that used to be the role of these, kind of insurgent newspapers and news gathering organizations.But what, what made New Times different, what made New Times successful was that found a business model to go with it. So our, our really our protagonist the show is a guy named Mike Lacey. Mike Lacey was a college student at the at Arizona State University in the early 70s, and he and a bunch of friends put together this anti Vietnam War protest paper. [00:10:00] At first, it was a collective. It was chaotically run. I'm sure with the ideals of the day in mind as they set the business structure, which was basically no business structure at all.And when I worked at New Times, very famously, Mike Lacey would talk about having donated plasma in the early days to keep the paper going right? These guys were broke. They're having fun. They're raising hell, but they Jim Larkin. Who was not a journalist, but who really enjoyed journalism and appreciated good journalism approached the paper sometime it started and said, look, I think you guys have a really good thing going. I Also think you don't know what you're doing on the business side I have a lot of ideas.And essentially Larkin didn't invent this model But I think he ran it very well, which was to sell a lot of small ads in the paper that maybe were coming from businesses sort of, they were selling these ads to businesses that were too small to advertise in the in the big [00:11:00] daily, which was the Arizona Republic in phoenix.So if you ran a very small business, or if you were a one person, if you were like a person giving guitar lessons, you were a handyman, or you were you were the kind of seamstress who would patch up people's clothes. Like this is the kind of stuff that, you know, you probably wouldn't place an ad in the daily, might just flyers around your neighborhood, but here comes this paper. The space is cheaper. You can buy small ads and you can participate in the community through your advertising, right?You, you become, you have a platform effectively. If you buy a little piece of this paper, the genius of classified ads, the absolute, the key to classified advertising. They're really two one, they are really small, but because they're small, you can sell them basically at a premium on the page. So if one page of advertising holds just one ad, that ad costs a lot of money.[00:12:00]But you have holds 200 ads collectively, those 200 ads add up to a lot more money than you would charge for the one. It's more work to put them in and also just know, it's, it's it's like any kind of, like, parceling up of a, of real estate, right? The smaller you cut it, the more you can sell, the more total sales value you're probably going to get out of it. So what happened in these papers, New Times especially, but The Voice did this, they could run literally thousands of these ads.And these ads were run by so many people from so many walks of life that, No one advertiser really had editorial say over the paper, which was key. If you had one big ad and one big advertiser, that company, and it was always a company at that point, that company would expect to have some leverage against paper.And they would. And dailies they did, anywhere, anywhere a big advertiser is funding a lot of the work of a journalism organization, they have a lot of say whether whether [00:13:00] the journalists even realize it or not, right? The owners make way for for a big advertiser. If there are thousands and thousands of advertisers, if it's that democratic, that collective and that many people are coming in, you can run a lot of material in the paper that could potentially piss a lot of them off.But be fine because if 10 people walk out, you don't really right? There's so many people advertising that it effectively creates this way of community support, financial support for a newspaper, a news venture, and New Times ran that model very well. They ran it in in Phoenix, and then eventually they saw other weekly papers around the country.This is in the early, mid nineties. Actually, I guess, yeah, the early, mid nineties is really when they started to expand and they saw other papers that maybe were doing good journalism that had the, had the instincts to cover their city really aggressively and and to connect with a community of readers, but maybe they didn't have the business down.And so [00:14:00] gradually New Times started buying up these papers. They went to Denver, they went to Miami. They went to San Francisco and where they went, they would buy a paper that maybe wasn't making as much money as it could. They sort of install their software, a way of thinking of it. Their, their business--SHEFFIELD: Their formula.EIFLING: Their formula, which they took lot of s**t for over the years, like having a formula, but they became very financially successful. And through that through a zillion teeny tiny ads, right, from people every walk of life, walking, walking into the newspaper with up to the ad window, sometimes dictating an ad, sometimes having it written down they were making at the time I guess 2005, they eventually merged the Village Voice Company and New Times.And when those two companies merged, they created a company that had Even though Craigslist was eating into their model at that, at that stage, then it combined [00:15:00] revenue of almost 200 million a year.It was a giant And that was off of, I think, 17 papers. And there was big money to be made, and a lot of. Bare journalism that just would not have any place, in many cases, at the Daily Papers because it was just too it was too unfriendly to kind of the, the ethos that most papers maintain to be to be the kind of like network TV of, of their city, right?These papers could be HBO or something more aggressive, something a little more adult, something a little more risk taking. And for a lot of journalists that made an attractive place to go try to start a career.SHEFFIELD: For people, I think, especially who kind of built. This alt weekly model. They, and the people who worked in it, at the, at the high level, I don't think they really understood that how abnormal this was and that this was a moment in history that was so [00:16:00] completely unique.Nothing like that had ever really been done before. And and it was fleeting with, with the rise of a Craigslist and, and social media.EIFLING: I think. I think that's right. I think we got a good, I know, 40 year run out of it, which I was lucky enough to grab a little piece of and a lot of my co creators too, we were, we were of a generation that look backward, enjoy the heyday, really the peak. We were there at the financial peak of alternative weeklies and maybe the cultural peak.And I think as the internet atomized journalism in different ways. The cultural need for a paper that did the things that those papers did also kind of dispersed, right? Like, they were very aggressive about covering music and culture and well, I mean, that's Ti…
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