James Anthony Larkin (June 16, 1949 – July 31, 2023) was an American publisher and journalist in Phoenix, Arizona, known for his influence in the alternative newspaper industry. He was largely responsible, along with business partner Michael Lacey, for his work with the Phoenix New Times, also known as New Times Inc.
With Larkin in charge of the business side and Lacey in charge of editorial, the two men expanded what had been a small, college-based publication into an industry giant to the value of $400 million.
Lacey and Larkin sold VVM in 2012 to long-time company executives, and the company was renamed Voice Media Group (VMG). Lacey and Larkin retained control of the classified ad site Backpage, which they co-founded in 2004 with ad exec Carl Ferrer as a competitor to Craigslist. Ferrer purchased Backpage in 2015 from Lacey and Larkin in a seller-financed deal. By that time, Backpage was under constant fire from state Attorneys General and various NGOs for listings appearing in its adult ad section. Critics accused Backpage of promoting prostitution and sex trafficking through its "adult" section, though the ads in the section had been found by several federal and state courts to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and the First Amendment.
Backpage closed its adult ad section in January 2017 on the eve of a federal hearing into its practices. The U.S. Department of Justice later convened a federal grand jury to investigate the company and in April 2018, the FBI arrested Larkin, Lacey and several others on charges of facilitating prostitution, money laundering, and conspiracy, with Ferrer turning state's evidence and promising to testify against his former employers in exchange for leniency.
Larkin, Lacey, and four others pleaded not guilty to all charges in the indictment—100 total, with each defendant being charged with different counts. The FBI also seized Backpage, removing it permanently from the internet. The trial for Larkin and his co-defendants began September 1, 2021, in federal court in Phoenix before U.S. District Court Judge Susan Brnovich, an appointee of President Donald Trump and the wife of Backpage critic, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican who ran to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Kelly in 2022.
On September 14, Brnovich granted a defense motion for mistrial, "after deciding prosecutors had too many references to child sex trafficking in a case where no one faced such a charge," according to the Associated Press. Brnovich said she had given prosecutors "leeway" to discuss sex trafficking as long as they did not linger on the details, but the government "abused that leeway."
Brnovich scheduled a new trial for February 2022. She recused herself without explanation in October 2021 and was replaced by federal Judge Diane Humetewa, a long-time ally of former U.S. Sen. John McCain. Lacey and Larkin claimed that McCain and his wife Cindy had driven the federal prosecution, saying it was payback for the days when their papers criticized McCain.
In December, Humetewa denied a defense motion to dismiss the case for double jeopardy, and a new trial was placed on hold while the defendants appealed her ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On September 21, 2022, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the defendants' request that the court reverses Humetewa and dismiss the case because a new trial would violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on Double Jeopardy. The panel wrote that "the government’s misconduct" during the trial "was not so egregious as to compel a finding" that prosecutors intended to provoke a mistrial, the legal standard for dismissal in this instance. A new trial was scheduled for August 8, 2023, but Larkin committed suicide on July 31, at the age of 74. Judge Humetewa rescheduled the trial for August 29.
Early life and career Raised in Phoenix, Arizona in what he once referred to as a "Catholic ghetto," Larkin attended St. Agnes grade school in Phoenix, then Gerard Catholic High School, where he reportedly co-founded a student newspaper, The Big Press, which criticized the school's administration, resulting in a brief suspension. He played football during his two-year stint at Phoenix Union College, then attended college in Mexico City, Mexico, where he was influenced by student protests against the Mexican government. (Larkin's mother died in 1951 before he turned two.)
After returning to Phoenix, he encountered the fledgling New Times weekly, first named the Arizona Times. It had been founded in 1970 by recent Arizona State University (ASU) dropout Michael Lacey and various other ASU students in opposition to the U.S. conflict in Vietnam, specifically the Nixon administration's incursion into Cambodia and the massacre of four students at Kent State University in Ohio, shot down by National Guard troops as the students protested President Richard Nixon's illegal expansion of the war.
As Lacey later recalled, in 1972, Larkin wrote "a long letter to New Times analyzing the local media and political scene," after which, the two men met and clicked, with Lacey saying that Larkin would eventually "grow into the single most important reason for [the paper's] later success".
In the spirit of the times, the paper was organized as a collective, which one writer described in later years as "more Maoist rag than H.L. Mencken chronicle." Unlike the other young hippie radicals dedicating themselves to the paper, Larkin was married with two children. "After working a full day at the paper," Lacey said, "[Larkin] then [drove] to Nantucket Lobster Trap, where he worked all night as a waiter. His perspective was decidedly practical as he worked alongside a staff of dreamers."
Meanwhile, Lacey, who had grown up in Newark, New Jersey, was giving blood, then plasma, to keep the paper going.
For the paper's 20th Anniversary edition in 1990, Larkin described that because the paper was a collective "anyone who had written ANYTHING for the paper -- a couple of record reviews even -- would have as much voice as I did, even though I was working there full time and it was my bread and butter." Larkin also noted that New Times survived "because there were so many people willing to work for nothing or next to nothing because . . . they thought they were part of a great social experiment".
Despite notable journalistic achievements in the paper's early years—such as exposing Arizona Sen. Paul Fannin's DUI coverup and illegal contributions by car dealers to Rep. John Conlan's Senate campaign—burnout was high, in part due to the paper's expansion into Tucson and a gruelling-though-successful fundraising effort to sell 35,000 shares of $1 stock, money that quickly dissipated. Larkin was named publisher and president of the company in 1974, but there was an exodus of personnel, including Lacey that year, and Larkin in 1975.
New ownership and management increasingly thought of the paper as a college publication centred around ASU, but in March 1977, Lacey and Larkin rendezvoused in Mexico and plotted a stockholder revolt, referred to by insiders as "the Coup," that placed them both back in control of the company, with Larkin as publisher and Lacey as executive editor. The paper's headquarters moved physically and symbolically from downtown Tempe to Phoenix's Westward Ho hotel. And the reborn weekly almost immediately enjoyed an unforeseen stroke of good fortune: A group of journalists calling themselves the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) had descended on Arizona in the wake of the 1976 car-bombing of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, producing the Arizona Report, a 23-part investigation into the corruption and organized crime that led to Bolles' killing. Though the Republic had reporters assigned to the IRE project, the establishment daily refused to publish the results, claiming the report fell short of journalistic standards. With Lacey not yet in Phoenix, Larkin and then-editor Geoff O'Connell decided to run the IRE report, giving their struggling paper an exclusive, routing the Republic on its own turf.
Lacey and Larkin renamed the paper Phoenix New Times (PNT) that same year. Ten years later, in 1987, they took the company private, with an $800,000 loan from Western Savings and Loan president Gary Driggs to buy out the remaining shareholders.
Newspaper business As Larkin told Phoenix Magazine in 1990, he was determined to be involved in the newspaper industry from a young age "because I knew it would be fun" and because "it had a power that was exponentially greater than it should have . . . that attracted me. And I knew that when I was 15 years old. I just knew it." The New Times editorial formula combined long-form, magazine-style, investigative and enterprise journalism with cultural criticism and food and music reporting. And Larkin "had a plan for a mass-marketed free paper that would attract the readership numbers needed for influence and ad dollars".
Paid advertising, especially affordable classified ads and personals, made the free paper profitable and able to afford full-time writing staff. Product placement was important, with circulation commanded by a Larkin-hire, former record store owner Scott Spear, who "placed the free paper in racks at suburban convenience stores and other locations such as gas stations and restaurants," and by the 1990s, circulation had increased to 140,000.
At that time, an estimated 81 percent of Phoenix New Times readers were 18 to 44 and appreciated the paper's anti-authoritarian approach to the news, with Larkin saying that the paper had always tried to be "outrageous" and that outrageousness was part of the paper's marketing strategy: "We try to keep people guessing; we try to get them emotionally involved," Larkin said; sometimes this meant losing an advertising account if the paper offended powerful individuals and companies.
As with all alternative papers, legal adult advertising—from strip clubs, erotic massage, escorts, etc.—was a part of PNT's revenue stream. The same could be said for the Yellow Pages of years past. For many years, such ads were relatively uncontroversial, though that would change in the late 1990s with the rise of online classified services such as Craigslist.
Another successful source of income for PNT was its yearly "Best Of" issue, which the paper successfully copyrighted and exported to sister outlets. Popular and thick with ads, the idea has been much copied by rival publications and continues to this day.
Free speech battles PNT was inspired by student protests against the Vietnam War, and throughout its history, the paper agitated on behalf of the First Amendment and even broader free speech rights. The first edition of the paper covered an anti-war demonstration at ASU and a simultaneous counterdemonstration by construction workers, aka, "hard hats," who took offense to the students' cause.
The paper's first major free speech fight was over advertisements for "a referral service for abortions that were performed legally in California" that ran in 1971 when abortion was illegal in Arizona. The City of Tempe took New Times, Inc. to court, and the paper was found guilty of violating a state law prohibiting such advertisements. The paper appealed, and on July 3, 1973, the Arizona Court of Appeals ruled in NTI's favor, finding that the U.S. Supreme Court's recent Roe v. Wade decision invalidated Arizona's abortion statutes.