Thursday, October 21, 2021

"Commie" paper's "owners" get sucker-punched, in part by selves

That's my take on what appears to be the definite hiatus and possible death of the Akron Devil Strip, as reported by Laura Hazard Owen at Niemen Lab.

It billed itself as Akron's first "community-owned magazine," hence the "Commie" in scare quotes. More specifically, per a presumed quote from its website by Owen?

It claimed to be the “first community-owned local news cooperative in the United States.”

OK, we'll get to those "owners" being in scare quotes in just a minute.

Whoever runs its Twitter said on Oct. 15: We ain't got money. Oh, and our founder took a self-imposed sabbatical a month ago.

NOW, per Owen, we get to those "owners," who allegedly owned the "means of production," but in reality?

In becoming a co-op in 2019, The Devil Strip said its “vested co-owners” (each of whom had donated at least $330) would be able to “vote on important issues” about the magazine, following “the ‘one person, one share, one vote’ principle.” But those co-owners — there were 94 of them — weren’t told The Devil Strip was in financial trouble, much less consulted on a path forward.

Oops.

I put out a trio of Tweets when reading this. First:

Many of the "owners" were whining, per Owen:

In the comments of The Devil Strip’s Facebook page, readers expressed confusion: “What’s the point of a co-op if the people have no say?” one wrote. Another: “What? Not even a chance for us owners to help raise additional funds?” 
“No indication at the annual meeting over the summer of 2021 that there was concern, but no financial recap despite my request before the meeting,” another co-owner recalled.

Gee, if you'd thought of something like my first Tweet, in advance?

The three remaining Devil Strip board members launched a Go Fund Me. (Of course they did.) And, despite many people saying "Fool me once ..." 60 suckers ponied up nearly $5K in the first six hours.

Tweet 2 gets to that and that sabbatical by Chris Horne.

But wait, it gets better, per Owen:

In addition to revenue from its members, The Devil Strip had received a total of $589,652 in philanthropic funding as of the end of 2020, according to its Donors page. Some of the larger contributors to that pool of funds included the Knight Foundation, which gave a total of $225,000 as of the end of 2020, and the Lenfest Foundation on behalf of the Facebook Journalism Project, which gave $100,000. Any 2021 donations are not listed on The Devil Strip’s site.

Gee, I'd like some of that, I said.

So, Knight, Lenfest etc. got suckered by someone who probably has bipolar disorder as part of what's behind him, and at the same time, were apparently suckers themselves with their seed money? Got it.

Meanwhile, who would trust the three remaining members of the board of directors, the ones who organized the Go Fund Me? Presumably, they had a hand in persuading Hodge to escort himself out the door and said nothing. Presumably, they had at least a glimpse of the financial problems and said nothing. (Or else they knew nothing, troubling itself.) They talk about recovering access to emails. Had Hodge locked them out? They say nothing. They promised the 60 new suckers nothing new in terms of legal language, AFAIK.

And, was there a need for it? Sure, the Beacon Journal is Gannett, but there's some sort of weekly, an alt-weekly, I guess, and a monthly lifestyles mag, per Wiki. Well, no, the Journal was a Black paper, not an alt-weekly, Google says, but it may have folded. There's also a non-alt-weekly which looks pretty decent on its website, AND a university paper.

That's a crowded journalism environment to be entering in today's world.

And, speaking of that apparently now shuttered Black paper? In the second menu bar, the black-stripped one, the Devil Strip has a link to "Black-owned businesses in Akron." But, on the "About" page? The staff you're invited to meet are all White. And, judging by them mainly having humanities degrees if not journalism ones? Upper-middle class parents. City-Data says Blacks are 30 percent of Akron itself and 15 percent of Summit County. People of other races or identifying as multiracial are another 12 percent of the city and 10 percent of the county. (There are no Hispanics or Asians on the Devil Strip staff, either.)

The "mag"? Its content at its website? From what I saw, it was written for exactly their own community, not the Akron community.

That would lead to the final question, and one purely rhetorical: What community were you expecting or wanting to "own" this paper? Back at Nieman, Joshua Benton has your number.

Seriously. Sounds like a whole lot of suckerdom out there.

I'm White myself, and have a professional graduate degree, but by money, economic class? My parents were nowhere near upper middle class. And, I don't identify with those people.

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