Michael Lacey (editor)

Michael Lacey
Born	(1948-07-30) July 30, 1948 (age 73)
Occupation	Journalist/editor
Employer	Formerly Village Voice Media

Michael G. Lacey (born July 30, 1948) is an Arizona-based journalist, editor, publisher and First Amendment advocate. He is the founder and former executive editor of the Phoenix New Times, which he and his business partner, publisher Jim Larkin, expanded into a nationwide chain of 17 alternative weeklies, known as Village Voice Media (VVM).^[1]

The company focused on long-form, magazine-style journalism, and included such papers as the Village Voice in New York, LA Weekly, Miami New Times and the OC Weekly in Orange County, California, among others.^[2]

Lacey's papers prized investigative reporting and set a high bar for writing. His writers won more than 3,800 writing awards, including 39 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, 67 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, 39 Investigative Writers and Editors awards, five finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and one Pulitzer for LA Weekly culinary scribe, Jonathan Gold, the first ever for food writing.^[3][4][5][6]

His writers focused on police misconduct, political corruption and abuse of power, and he and his reporters often became targets for retribution by political enemies and law enforcement. The most famous of these was Lacey and Larkin's arrests by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, after the pair exposed illegal grand jury subpoenas, demanding notes and other investigative material from journalists at Phoenix New Times, as well as information on the papers’ online readers.^[7][8]

The arrests of two prominent newspapermen caused an outcry, and the county attorney dropped the case. Lacey and Larkin sued, eventually receiving a $3.75 million settlement, which they donated to pro-immigrant organizations in Arizona.^[9]

Lacey and Larkin sold VVM to company execs in 2012, separating the company from Backpage.com, a classified listings site they created in 2004 to compete with Craigslist.org.^[10]

Backpage came under criticism from state attorneys general and nonprofits that accused the company of facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking through its adult, dating and massage sections. Backpage cooperated with law enforcement and moderated its site for illegal activity, but attorneys general and others demanded the site take down all adult-oriented ads, even though federal court rulings found the ads to be First Amendment-protected speech. The ads also enjoyed Section 230 immunity, which generally holds websites harmless for content posted by users.^{[9][11][12][13]}

In 2015, Lacey and Larkin sold the company to its CEO, Carl Ferrer.^[14]

In October 2016, then-California AG Kamala Harris had Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer arrested on pimping charges. Harris was running for U.S. Senate at the time. The pimping charges were twice thrown out based on the First Amendment, Section 230 and the AG's lack of jurisdiction, which Harris was aware of when her office filed the charges.^[15][16][17]

On April 6, 2018, the FBI raided Lacey and Larkin's homes and seizing Backpage and removing it from the internet. They and four former Backpage execs face up to 100 counts of facilitating prostitution, money laundering and conspiracy. All six have pleaded not guilty. Their trial commenced on Sept. 1, 2021.^[18][9][19] After eight days and four witnesses Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial.^{[20] [21][22]} During the trial, the judge warned the prosecution to avoid discussion of sex trafficking and child sex trafficking, which the defendants are not charged with, and to keep their focus on the actual charges of facilitating prostitution under the U.S. Travel Act. But the prosecution's opening statement and two prosecution witnesses both discussed child sex trafficking. The judge felt that the cumulative effect of the government's opening statement and the prosecution's questioning of these witnesses unfairly tainted the jury.^[23]

Brnovich scheduled a new trial for Feb. 22, 2022.^[24] She later recused herself from the case. Federal Judge Diane Humetewa was appointed to replace her. In a Jan. 20, 2022 article in Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported the following: "A new federal trial was supposed to start in February, but it's been postponed as the parties battle over whether the case should be totally dismissed. In December, a district judge dismissed defendants' motion to dismiss; they responded by appealing to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."^[25]

Early life[]

Michael Lacey was born in Binghamton, New York. His father was a sailor-turned construction worker. His mother was an opera singer and registered nurse. Lacey attended Essex County Catholic grade schools in Newark, New Jersey. In 1966, he graduated from Arts High School, an integrated public school in Newark, where he was a member of the student council.^[10][10][26]

Lacey credited his father for his early interest in journalism, saying his dad made him read the New York-Journal American newspaper on a daily basis. Lacey also started a newspaper in grade school.^[26]

He grew up as a “bright, bookish boy,” whose father was physically abusive towards him and would beat him if he lost a fight at school. Lacey toughened up with age. On Lacey’s knuckles are tattooed the words “Hold Fast,” a famous sailor’s motto that was also tattooed on his father’s fingers.^[27][10]

After graduation from high school, Lacey moved to Tempe, Arizona to attend Arizona State University. He took one journalism class before dropping out to start his own student newspaper, which would eventually become the Phoenix New Times.^[26]

In response to the 1970 Kent State massacre and the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Lacey helped organize a student demonstration on campus, demanding the U.S. flag at the university be flown at half-staff in honor of the four people killed at Kent State. Then-Arizona Gov. Jack Williams ordered the flag be defended “with whatever force necessary,” but the head of campus security lowered the flag briefly to placate the students.^[28][29]

Lacey and other anti-war activists were angered by the Arizona Republic’s hostile editorial view of student demonstrators. The Republic’s political cartoonist Reg Manning depicted them as “campus terrorists,” showing a disheveled, long-haired student with a torch in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, and the words, “Hang ivy on me – and call me a student.”^[30]

In a 2005 New York Magazine profile, Lacey said of the paper’s founding: “We didn’t want to burn down the ROTC building, we just wanted to lower the flag because it was the right thing to do. Somehow, we thought we needed to start a newspaper to get the nuances of that point across. And to have a little fun. Throw a little spirit of Mad Magazine into the debate.”^[31]

A former employee of Lacey's wrote, "Mike Lacey was a Vietnam protester, an Irish kid from Jersey who’d dropped out of Arizona State." As an alternative to the ultra-conservative Arizona Republic, he started a paper that "would cover politics, culture and music for the sex-drugs-rock’n’roll generation."^[32][10][33]

Newspaper career[]

The first weekly alternative newspaper was called the Arizona Times. Two years after the founding Jim Larkin joined as business manager. They were called Lacey’n’Larkin, the editor-publisher duo who, over the decades, bought and started alternative weeklies across the country. In the 1970s the newspaper went public, and Larkin and Lacey drifted away; they regained control and took it private in 1977, and renamed it the Phoenix New Times, with Lacey as editor and Larkin as publisher. From a circulation low of 16,000 in 1977, it grew to 140,000 by the 1990s, with annual revenue of $8.6 million^[34] Beginning in 1983 he and Larkin bought and started multiple other alternative newspapers, and by 2000 they owned eleven. In 2005 they bought the Village Voice and five others. The company had a market value of $400 million and a combined circulation of 1.8 million. A self-described "prick" who comes complete with "spiky gray hair, watery pale-blue eyes,"^[31] he was known for his bombastic style; he described his editorial philosophy as: “Our papers have butt-violated every goddamn politician who ever came down the pike! The ones who deserved it. As a journalist, if you don’t get up in the morning and say ‘fuck you’ to someone, why even do it?”^[35] There was a sense among his competitors that his papers were vicious corporate sharks, out to annihilate, not compete.^[31][26] To his employees-he was demanding with a volatile temper, he made enemies, but, was fiercely loyal to the people he liked, and, he drank. His papers were often known for unforgettable stories "with characters that burst off the page and plot twists no one could have predicted. These stories changed lives, cities, and occasionally landed the people at the center of them in front of a judge."^[36]

The good times did not last for print journalism, with the Internet devouring advertising profits.^[37] Lacey reacted to increased Internet advertising with Backpage.com, beginning in 2004, trying to maintain the company's hold on ads that traditional newspapers had largely shunned, adult services. It evolved out of the literal back page of the Phoenix New Times newspaper and morphed into a behemoth Internet marketplace. By 2010, after Craigslist shuttered its adult content section, Backpage.com had become the main financial driver of the company, then called Village Voice Media.^[35] In 2012 Lacey left journalism, selling his interests in 13 newspapers, but keeping ownership of Backpage.^[38]

Lacey had a longstanding feud with Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, leading to a 2007 subpoena requesting the I.P. addresses of all who had visited the Phoenix New Times website over the past three years.^[39] When, as an act of civil disobedience,^[40] the Phoenix New Times published the subpoena, Lacey and Larkin were arrested for this act. Freed the next day, charges were dropped.^[41] Maricopa County settled with them for 3.75 million.^[42] The showdown with Arpaio added to Lacey's "already swashbuckling Media Bad Boy mythology."^[43] $2 million of the settlement was used to help create an endowed chair of borderlands Professorship for the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University .^[44] Some of the funds were used to start a human rights and immigration initiative, the Lacey and Larkin Frontera Fund,^[45] largely to benefit the Hispanic community that "has borne the brunt of racial animus and civil rights abuses in Arizona."^[46]

Backpage[]

The business was lucrative. The adult ads were among the few Backpage charged users to post. Backpage earned $135 million in 2014, according to a U.S. Senate report. A February 2015 appraisal said the company was worth more than $600 million^[47] At the time, Backpage was the largest online publisher of sex ads in the world with city-specific sites spanning 97 countries. In the 11 years since it had been launched, it had earned some $500 million for its owners. They were largely impervious to legal challenges because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protected online publishers from civil or criminal penalties for hosting content posted by third parties. Legal momentum started to change in 2015 after a senate investigation. They were forced to hand over millions of pages of incriminating material. The Justice Dept. used this information to come up with a massive 93 count indictment in March 2018, that centered on Lacey and Larkin, and accused them, and other company officers, with money laundering, participating in a criminal conspiracy and facilitating prostitution.^[35] In April it was announced that Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer had pleaded guilty and will testify against other Backpage officials.^[48] Lacey spent a week in federal custody, released on April 13, 2018, with a $1 million bond. Lacey's attorneys claim he is protected by the free speech guarantees of the First Amendment.^[49] Company officials insists they hosted trafficking sites unwittingly.^[50] Backpage was shut down by federal authorities in April 2018.^[51][52] With the closure of Backpage, devastated sex workers turned to social media. To them, Backpage's demise meant the end of safeguards and a reliable revenue stream in a profession that's not going anywhere.^[53]

Awards[]

• Arizona Civil Libertarian of the Year, ("ACLU's highest honor bestowed annually to individuals who make outstanding contributions to the advancement of civil liberties") 2008^[54]
• Arizona Music Hall of Fame^[55]
• Distinguished Service Award, Arizona Press Club, 2007 (lifetime accolade was given for Lacey's 38 years as a writer, editor and newspaper owner in Arizona)^[56]
• New America Award, ("Placed the local sheriff under the microscope and reported on his bias against Maricopa County (Ariz.) residents of color.) 2010^[57]
• Golden Quill Award, 1998^[58]
• John Kolbe Politics and Government Reporting Award, 2007^[56]
• Clarion Award, for newspaper feature writing, 2011, ("Lacey's What's My Mom Worth^[59] ...was a departure from ordinary newspaper storytelling.")^[60]
• James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, 2011 ("For deploying reporters...to tell vivid tales of the travails and contributions of Latinos Amongst U.S. Their work counters nativist fear-mongering and opens space for a coherent immigration policy.")^[61]
• Phoenix Business Journal, "Professional Recognition," (for standing up for migrants' rights) 2017^[46]

References[]

External links[]

• President Trump signs anti-trafficking bill
• Jana Bommersbach discusses Michael Lacey