Michael Lacey (editor)

Michael Lacey is the former editor of the Phoenix New Times and The Village Voice, a First Amendment proponent, and is currently under federal indictment for facilitating prostitution.
Early life.
Michael Lacey was born in Binghamton, New York; he went to Catholic schools in Newark, New Jersey, before moving to Arizona at attend Arizona State University. In response to the 1970 Kent State massacre, Lacey wanted flags at the University to be flown at halt-mast. Angered by being told that would not be done, Lacey and several friends started an alternative newspaper "to get the nuances of that point across. And to have a little fun." "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."
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 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," 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?” There was a sense among his competitors that his papers were vicious corporate sharks, out to annihilate, not compete. 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."
The good times did not last for print journalism, with the Internet devouring advertising profits. 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. In 2012 Lacey left journalism, selling his interests in 13 newspapers, but keeping ownership of Backpage.
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. When, as an act of civil disobedience, the Phoenix New Times published the subpoena, Lacey and Larkin were arrested for this act. Freed the next day, charges were dropped. Maricopa County settled with them for 3.75 million. The showdown with Arpaio added to Lacey's "already swashbuckling Media Bad Boy mythology." $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 . Some of the funds were used to start a human rights and immigration initiative, the "Lacey and Larkin Frontera Fund", largely to benefit the Hispanic community that "has borne the brunt of racial animus and civil rights abuses in Arizona."
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 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. In April it was announced that Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer had pleaded guilty and will testify against other Backpage officials. 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. Company officials insists they hosted trafficking sites unwittingly. Backpage was shut down by federal authorities in April 2018. 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.