Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling

https://www.independent.com/2024/03/29/santa-barbaras-collective-memory-sold-for-kindling/

by shortformblog • 2 years ago

279 81 2 years ago

Hey all, just sharing this with a quick note. Recently, I was part of a small group of journalists/researchers who determined that the sports site Deadspin sold to investors with close affiliations with the online gaming affiliate industry in Malta.

Eventually, it led to a story in 404 Media that tied specific names to the purchase and highlighted some of their M.O.: https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publish...

It turns out that one of the key figures in the Deadspin purchase is also attempting to buy a bankrupt newspaper’s website, likely because the domain (NewsPress.com) has a lot of SEO value. That’s what the above story is about.

This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

jonah2• 2 years ago

Thanks for digging into this and for sharing this article! I hadn't seen this latest twist.

I'm friends with a number of the "paper’s staff who staged a mass walk-out". Very difficult times. Not mentioned in this article was the staff’s long struggle for union representation which they did finally get much to the ire of the owner.

The independent.com (another great, "generic", domain name!) has been covering the saga for decades: https://www.independent.com/?s=santa+barbara+news-press

shortformblog9• 2 years ago

Sad tale. In its own way, as bad as the private equity management we’ve been seeing in chains throughout the country.

There has to be a great story as to how these two news sites in the same town got such high-quality domains.

KennyBlanken2• 2 years ago

I chortled at the claim that deadspin is "beloved"

causality02• 2 years ago

"Beloved" doesn't necessarily mean good journalism. The type of rage-bait that includes trying to publicly shame a Native American child for painting his face in team colors and wearing a family headdress to a football game is likely to make you quite beloved among a certain crowd.

BoxFour• 2 years ago

Among sports fans old Deadspin, specifically the previous iteration with columnists like Drew Magary, is pretty beloved.

Currently Defector is trying hard to occupy the gap left by it.

ntnsndr• 2 years ago

One outcome of the Deadspin mess might be instructive—a group of journalists abandoned it and started Defector, a successful worker co-op.

After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/business/media/deadspin-s...

For more context on cooperatives in journalism, see https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mij/15031809.0007.203?view=text...

burkaman• 2 years ago

404 Media itself is a similar collective of ex-Vice people, I think pretty directly inspired by Defector.

AndrewKemendo2• 2 years ago

Glad to see worker cooperatives popping up!

eru3• 2 years ago

This story is really important, because it is essentially putting a community’s history at risk. To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

Huh? It's just a domain name. None of the history in none of the archives is going away.

shortformblog9• 2 years ago

From the literal article:

After all, the archive is our collective memoir, if we can keep it. No complete digital record seems to exist in any other one place — not the Santa Barbara Public Library, UC Riverside’s California Newspaper Project, the Library of Congress, Newspapers.com, or the like.

throw0101c• 2 years ago

To me, it feels like a harbinger of what we could see in the future re: domain purchases.

Something that the iSCSI folks considered:

      -  A date code, in yyyy-mm format.  This date MUST be a date
         during which the naming authority owned the domain name used in
         this format, and SHOULD be the first month in which the domain
         name was owned by this naming authority at 00:01 GMT of the
         first day of the month.  This date code uses the Gregorian
         calendar.  All four digits in the year must be present.  Both
         digits of the month must be present, with January == "01" and
         December == "12".  The dash must be included.

* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3720#section-3.2.6....

So if there was a change of ownership, the IQN would change.

araes• 2 years ago

Is this a big trend lately? Buying old newspapers and then putting them back up as SEO shell farms with recognizable names?

There was another story on here just a little bit back about an East coast lady that had her article stolen by a paper she used to work for, that then returned, zombified, under the same name, yet with different bylines.

Similar to this article from Buzzfeed (2020) about pseudo-"local" news websites. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/these-fa...

kjkjadksj• 2 years ago

It’s a shame these former voices don’t band together more often and just try and run a cheap to host site covering the same local topics. You don’t need to sustain the overhead to print and circulate or even rent an office anymore. I’d pay for that, I’m sure I’m not the only one either.

jonah2• 2 years ago

There are other local, online-only news sources which now involve some of the previous Santa Barbara News-Press staff.

https://www.independent.com

https://www.edhat.com

https://www.noozhawk.com

https://www.montecitojournal.net

etc.

selimthegrim• 2 years ago

Edhat is a long running local site.

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

I can't help but feel surpassing $250,000.00 at auction is no big deal for a city with ~88,000 residents, in this age of crowdfunding and otherwise asking for donations the old fashioned way.

So this is less a question of whether the residents can pay, but rather whether the residents value this archive at all.

gedy• 2 years ago

Not to mention this is Santa Barbara which has a lot of monied residents.

delichon• 2 years ago

We'll find out a week from Tuesday.

  A last chance to win the day will take place at 2 p.m. on April 9 in room 201 of the United States Bankruptcy Court, 1415 State Street, Santa Barbara. There, a live auction will occur whereby the current price of $250,000 may be bested only by in-person bidding.

goodSteveramos• 2 years ago

Correct. I think the idea of this article is to raise awareness so the local residents can pony up the cash to save the website.

smcin• 2 years ago

Not really, who said the residents are the only potential bidders? Public or private museums or collectors might be interested.

1868-1990s covers almost the entire history of California as a state, the photos alone shoule be interesting.

In the silent film era 1910-1922, Santa Barbara housed the then world's largest movie studio (Flying A Studios) until it outgrew the town and moved to Hollywood. Those years should be quite interesting.

KennyBlanken2• 2 years ago

The paper declared bankruptcy on July 21, 2023. In a fitting final insult, the court filing listed more than $116,000 in company assets — an implausibly low valuation — as it was revealed McCaw had previously shifted the real estate property of the newspaper’s historic De la Guerra Plaza headquarters and Goleta printing plant into private LLCs under her control

This is also a very standard play in the private equity field. The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp.

This is how they kill off assisted living homes. They don't bother with cost-cutting; they just keep jacking the "rent" the property-owning corp charges the assisted living facility entity. In desperation to keep the home for residents, the staff cut every cost they can. Cracks in care quickly appear, everyone who can leave does which means lots of lost cash flow and expenses split among fewer residents...at some point there's just no more squeezing possible, the corp misses a rent payment...and that's that.

It's also the classic plot for many stories; gang/army strong-arms a village and keeps asking for larger and larger takes of the village's crops, eventually leading to the villagers starving, etc.

jmholla• 2 years ago

It's nuts that this is legal. This is seems so fraudulent to me: giving away your assets to an entity so you can rent them back from that entity.

db48x• 2 years ago

Why wouldn’t it be legal? They own both corporations, and have all the rights in the world to dispose of the property as they see fit.

Animats2• 2 years ago

For retirement communities, it's called "upstreaming". Residents of the Hyatt Residences near Stanford litigated that and, after eight years, settled.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_Senior_Living#Litigation

[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/19/residents-sue-palo-al...

moomoo11• 2 years ago

Yikes man do MBA types and PE just wake up and think of evil fucked up ways to make money?

My dad works at a company run by PE monkeys who are some of the most evil mfs. My dad is a smart guy but he’s an immigrant and he says he can think but he can’t talk. It’s unfortunate but it pisses me off how badly they treat him and others.

lotsofpulp• 2 years ago

The property (which is usually what they really wanted) is forked off to a different entity, and then that entity charges rent back to the original corp.

The IRS treats the owner’s basis in an entity differently based on being a business or passive activity. Included in basis for a passive investment is both recourse and nonrecourse debt, while the basis in a business such as a newspaper takes into account the recourse debt.

If the business and passive activity are not separated, then if the owners refinance the asset with non recourse debt and distribute additional proceeds, it is a capital gain since the non recourse debt does not increase each partner’s basis.

However, if you separate the business activity and passive activity, then the partners can include all the non recourse debt in their basis, and any distribution from refinancing would not be taxable.

This is why you typically want your real estate to be a separate entity collecting rent from the entity operating the business.

neilv• 2 years ago

It's also the classic plot for many stories;

And a more general trope: one idea that stuck with me from childhood TV was that badguys were always trying to drive people off their land. (Scooby Doo, A-Team, Airwolf, etc.)

But what TV also taught us kids was that, no matter what weapons the badguys bolted onto a trafficopter, the big black attack helicopter of justice would rain Hellfires down upon them.

Where are the Airwolves, BA Baracuses, and Mystery Teams that we were promised?

EMM_386• 2 years ago

They are doing this with hospitals also. Hospitals.

The large PE firms come in, buy the hospital and rent the land back to it. Eventually the hospital goes under.

This involves some of the biggest PE firms out there, and often MPT - "Medical Properties Trust".

"The plundering of America's hospitals":

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-wealthy-investors-got-ri...

ilamont• 2 years ago

Perhaps most disturbing of all, in just the past year, an industry trend appears to have kicked off in which a subset of SEO companies has begun to acquire the domain names and historical digital content archives of defunct small-town American newspapers for the express purpose of turning them into highly profitable backlink farms.

Does anyone think that these backlink farms will have much value 2 or 3 years from now?

This is not just about the role of AI providing better search results or answers to typical queries. It's also the longstanding decline in relevance of Google search queries gummed up with ads and SEO-optimized junk.

AndrewKemendo2• 2 years ago

Doesn’t really matter. The people behind this aren’t interested in anything beyond quick dollars

ryukoposting2• 2 years ago

Money is money, and if the cost of making a million dollars is $250K and incinerating a town's entire historical record, apparently that's a fine price for some people.

Throw this on the heap of systemic ethical transgressions of the advertising industry, along with list selling, poor targeting practices, ...

short_sells_poo• 2 years ago

It's grotesque that this is not even the direct effect of the advertising industry, it is the side effect of Google's algo to sort results.

Being ranked higher in the Goog results is sadly worth more than a town's historical records.

I wonder if things were different if Google wasn't allowed to monopolize search.

p3rls2• 2 years ago

I thought Google's blogspam was going to be defeated roughly 2010 and invested my entire networth into a legitimate website to take out my niche.

It didn't work-- blogspam destroyed my app in traffic 5:1. My main blogspam competitor literally still gets hacked every other day but after all this time is still #1 on google. He posts on twitter in broken English that he doesn't understand why ISPs are blocking him, but it doesn't matter. The backlinks he bought back when he started launched him sky high, he even got a few legit links now from NYT, LATimes etc, despite being the ugliest blogspam you've ever seen.

I wouldn't expect Google to fix anything, these spammers already made their fortunes. Check out r/seo sometime and look at some of the accounts that post there. These people can't put together complete sentences but were dominating Google for a decade. This last March update was -finally- a step in the right direction.

Hnrobert42• 2 years ago

I sympathize with your plight, and I see blogspam as theft.

These people can’t put together complete sentences but were dominating Google for a decade.

But it is a mistake to confuse poor English with lack of intelligence or ability.

giblfiz• 2 years ago

THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!

SOMEONE SHOULD KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF OUR PRECIOUS CULTURAL HERITAGE.

They could even keep in on the internet!

We could call it the "Internet Archive"

And with this amazing technology, there could even be a way we could go way back and look at things that were published before, right on the internet as well.

We could call it the "wayback machine"

Oh wait: http://web.archive.org/web/20220322003618/https://newspress....

Seriously though, three out of four times when I see someone crying "but our precious cultural heritage" it's something that has already been taken care of by archive.org, or that it would be trivial to have them help out with, instead of trying to force the hand of some corporate giant.

Did you know that archive.org even has a special legal exemption to ignore copyright law for archiving software?

shortformblog9• 2 years ago

Relying on an underfunded nonprofit to protect information incompletely is never going to be as good as having access to the original information source. I could point to many reasons for this, but let me start with just one: The internet has been around as a mainstream entity for just 30 years. The newspaper has 155 years of archives. Those archives have not been put on a number of vintage newspaper archive sites, making this information impossible to access.

Have you ever dealt with newspaper archives? Morgues of old content? They are often complex to manage and digitize. The Internet Archive, being asked to manage the literal history of the internet, has a massive backlog. It would be significantly better if someone who actually was up close and had an organizational interest in managing it could do it instead, because that makes the lift far easier to deal with.

The Internet Archive is an important tool, but it is not the silver bullet you think it is. It is not a set-it-and-forget-it tool. It is the recovery option of last resort, and it puts a lot of pressure on the organization to treat them as a simple replacement for content that should just be online. Any researcher worth their salt will tell you that.

dr_kiszonka• 2 years ago

Is the Malta-based company vehemently against giving archivists access to the newspaper's archives? I can't imagine they would have any good use for it.

ajmurmann3• 2 years ago

What parts of this problem aren't solved by archive.org?

shortformblog9• 2 years ago

We shouldn’t rely on the Internet Archive when we don’t have to. It is a nonprofit that has faced significant legal challenges in recent years, and it has many other priorities. It’s a backup in case of disaster and a historical record, not a replacement. I love it and its value is immaculate, but it is asking too much of it to clean up every mess like this.

There’s also the print archives, which are not available online.

ghaff5• 2 years ago

Then that's an issue for the Library of Congress or whoever. It's completely unreasonable to expect any private business to somehow maintain a record of their archives ad infinitum especially if they're no longer in business and there aren't any employees. Certainly non-journalistic corporate records of all sorts die with the company unless someone else has kept and shared a copy.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

Archive.org is great but they dont have the name recognition or SEO ranking to compete with the original site. Normies don’t know to look there.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

This seems to be a problem (among others in this story) which Google could answer to.

One thought that comes to mind is that no site's reputation should automatically survive transfer of ownership of that site.

If a site's new owners share the mission and custodial mission of the original owners, fine. If not, the site starts from zilch. Or better: negative assertion value given the long history of link-farming and its exceedingly well-understood common weal costs.

ajmurmann3• 2 years ago

So now we moved the goal post from preserving the communities memory to beating other companies at SEO?

timbeccue• 2 years ago

Part of the problem is the potential loss of public value in the form of the undigitized archive, and archive.org provides no solution for that.

Now, is it the responsibility of organization X or person Y to preserve this value? I’m not sure, but that seems to be a separate (albeit also interesting) question.

_xnmw• 2 years ago

For me, the real story here is not about losing some newspaper archives. The real story here is to show how broken the system is right now. Is this even a human society anymore? Where SEO link farms and AI-generated junk replace local community history, where prime real estate is gutted by private equity firms, and all of this is done through shadowy foreign-registered businesses that have no stake in your collective well-being. And there are some who defend this as capitalism. The market decided what is worth keeping, they said. Except "the market" isn't human, and what it has decided to keep isn't something I, as a human, want to be a part of.

pizzaknife• 2 years ago

Hey i worked there for several years during the wendy drama. glad to see people are interested in this sb treasure

heliodor• 2 years ago

A lot more people would be interested in bidding for a domain name than for a company that owns a domain name.

The domain name should be auctioned off separately but the bankruptcy court is more interested in completing the task in the easiest way possible for them instead of doing things right.

avipars• 2 years ago

is it possible to work with archive.org to mirror the last version of the site?

Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling

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