S central business district and circulation grew to 140,000 weekly by the early 1990s. Browse the weekly print newspaper — and the latest special issues — from your laptop with Miami New Times’ interactive flipbook. One person employed as a moderator for Backpage told a subcommittee investigator that the policing of language was designed to allow prostitution ads without being obvious.
“Escort ads on Backpage.com are protected speech under the First Amendment, as several courts have held,” reads the motion filed Wednesday. I can’t imagine that happening at one of today’s totally efficient, humorless newspapers. Last week I spent a few days in Chicago with Paul Galloway, an old friend I used to work with there. “Remember case signals crackdown ordinary critics say the night you tried to throw a chair through the editor’s door?” I asked. You may find it hard to believe, but there was a time when every newspaper in the country had its own individual look and personality. Browse the weekly print newspaper — and the latest special issues — from your laptop with Phoenix New Times’ interactive flipbook.
Supreme Court in the interim, a 1973 ruling from the Arizona Court of Appeals not only invalidated the conviction but found the state’s whole set of abortion statutes unconstitutional. Ironically, their first big showdown with government would also revolve around advertising. For most of their careers, Lacey and Larkin were anti-heroes of the “alternative press” scene—scrappy purveyors of what longtime California Bay Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann called “desert libertarianism.” FBI officials in Phoenix confirmed Friday that “law enforcement activity is occurring” at the Sedona home of Backpage founder Michael Lacey. Prosecutors said the moderation efforts by the site were aimed at concealing the true nature of the ads. Though Lacey and Larkin sold their interest in Backpage in 2015, prosecutors said the two founders retained control over the site.
In fact, law enforcement sources have over the years consistently applauded Backpage for its help making cases against predators and locating runaway teens. After its 2004 launch, Backpage became inextricably linked in the popular imagination with sex trafficking, thanks to a relentless campaign by well-funded activists, government lawyers, and some of the nation’s most prominent politicians. Officials heralded the April 2018 FBI seizure of the website and the arrests of Lacey and Larkin as a major victory against the exploitation of women and children. In a statement released Monday, Lacey and Larkin called the case against them an “epic government overreach,” maintained content on the site was protected by the First Amendment and said the site aided law enforcement whenever when concerns arose about the safety of a woman or child. LOS ANGELES – A group of managers is buying the Village Voice and all its affiliated free weeklies, including Phoenix New Times but is leaving behind the online classified site Backpage.com, whose listings have drawn fire for promoting the illegal sex trade.
They also confiscated her jewelry—decades’ worth of items, almost all accumulated long before she met Michael—and made her provide documentation of where each piece came from before getting it back. Instead, Michael would spend the second week of April in a federal detention center, with part of that time spent locked up in an isolation cell. In theory, the January 10 hearing was focused on the narrow question of whether Backpage had “knowingly” edited user posts in a way that would deprive it of Section 230 protection and allow the feds to target it under the SAVE Act. In practice, it was a show trial designed to publicly shame all three men. Lacey and Larkin were also arrested and charged with “conspiracy to commit pimping.” They spent four days jailed in Sacramento, California. Senate, called them “despicable” and labeled Backpage “the world’s top online brothel.”
Backpage.com has become the nation’s top forum for ads for “escorts,” “body rubs,” and other thinly veiled references to prostitution since Craigslist.org shut down its adult services section in September 2010. Phoenix New Times is ranked #39 on the Best Media Companies to Work For in Arizona list. Zippia’s Best Places to Work lists provide unbiased, data-based evaluations of companies. Rankings are based on government and proprietary data on salaries, company financial health, and employee diversity. New Times bolstered its presence in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2001 with the purchase of the East Bay Express, a locally owned weekly in Berkeley, California.