Trevor Aaronson et al. - Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website

Written by Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website
Read by Trevor Aaronson, Sam Eifling, Michael Mooney
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 96 Kbps

Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website
By: Trevor Aaronson, Sam Eifling, Michael Mooney
Narrated by: Trevor Aaronson, Sam Eifling, Michael Mooney
Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
Original Recording Audiobook
Release date: 04-11-24
Language: English
Publisher: Audible Originals
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, True Crime

About this Audible Original

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 fraught frontiers of free speech in America.

©2024 Trevor Aaronson, Sam Eifling, Michael Mooney, LLC (P)2024 Audible Originals, LLC

About the Creator

Trevor Aaronson is the author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism. He is also the creator and host of the podcast series Alphabet Boys and the Audible Original American ISIS.