New Audible Original 'Hold Fast' Explores Journalism, Adult Ads, Moral Panics, and Backpage.com
"Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website" premieres today on Audible
“Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website,” an Audible Original documentary podcast that premieres today, is two decades in the making.
Well, kind of.
Back in the early aughts, at the start of my career, I found myself in South Florida as a staff writer for a chain of muckraking alternative weekly newspapers called New Times. This company, later known as Village Voice Media, was renowned for its investigative reporting, narrative writing, cultural coverage, and the infamous “back pages” — the final 20 to 30 pages of ambiguously worded adult advertisements that would make half the country blush. These ads promoted sex work — illegal activity — but because they were ambiguously worded, federal judges had upheld First Amendment protections for these ads.
As Craigslist destroyed newspapers’ economic model, New Times/Village Voice Media started a knockoff website, Backpage.com, which brought the business of adult ads to an industrial scale. Backpage.com also brought controversy — including years of stories about sexual exploitation and sex trafficking — until finally, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, the founders of the New Times newspaper chain, were indicted on federal charges.
Four years ago, I started collaborating with Sam Eifling and Michael Mooney, both of whom also once worked for the New Times chain. We set out to answer the question: What happened to Lacey and Larkin, the foul-mouthed newspapermen we worked for two decades ago, who were now facing a 100-count indictment?
The search for that answer became the nine-episode Audible Original series “Hold Fast,” produced by Western Sound.
Here’s the official show description:
Hold Fast is the uncompromising story of Backpage.com, the world’s most scandalous website, and the rise and fall of alternative weekly newspapers nationwide.
Over four decades, Michael Lacey and his business partner James Larkin built the largest, most influential company in alternative media — a colossal chain of muckraking newspapers that included The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Phoenix New Times, Dallas Observer, Miami New Times, and others. These alternative newspapers published writers who were fierce investigators, stylish storytellers, and astute cultural critics. These papers also published loads and loads of ads, including page after page of so-called “adult ads” — ambiguously written ads that appeared to offer illegal sexual services but were nonetheless protected by the First Amendment.
As lucrative classified ads moved to the internet, cutting a hole in the money bag of newspapers everywhere, Lacey and Larkin founded Backpage.com, a classifieds website that would become synonymous with sex ads and scandal. The Justice Department alleges that Lacey and Larkin weren’t just newspapermen. They were, prosecutors say, the biggest pimps in the history of the world.
Reported, written, and hosted by three writers who once worked for Lacey’s newspaper chain — Trevor Aaronson, Sam Eifling, and Michael Mooney — Hold Fast is a romp through the weird history and boundary-pushing culture of alternative newspapers; the controversies surrounding Backpage.com and the government investigations; and the fraught frontiers of free speech in America.