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The scandal at News of the World, one of Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid papers, got so damning that Murdoch killed the paper, in hopes of saving the rest of his British media empire (and its cozy relations to top politicians).
The Sunday-only NOTW harkens back to 1843. It was one of the English-speaking world’s first true mass-market papers. From the start, it was heavy on scandal, gossip, gory crime, sports, and as much sex as censorship laws of the time allowed.
When I first found it at out-of-town newspaper stands in the 1980s, NOTW was a tentacle of the Murdoch octopus (and had been since 1969). It was big at the time on fun sex stories, such as “Cheeky Memoirs of the Wedding Photographers.”
This was around the time of Joe Jackson’s song “Sunday Papers,” about NOTW and its tabloid brethren.
In recent years, NOTW’s circulation dropped, from almost 9 million in its pre-Murdoch 1950s to under 3 million. The paper’s editors were ever on the prowl for the latest and dirtiest dirt on public figures. With daily tabloids (such as Murdoch’s Sun) and websites after the same dirt, NOTW went to extremes to get its own, exclusive dirt.
That led to the hacking of cell phones.
First, they tapped the phones of actors and soccer players.
Then the phones of politicians.
Then the phones of violent-crime victims and their families.
That was the last straw. Even Murdoch’s pet politicians turned against him.
It could just be that Murdoch has other agendas behind closing the paper, besides saving PR face.
After dumping this separate Sunday paper with its separate staff, he could theoretically re-enter the market later with a Sunday edition of The Sun, which could be relatively cheaper to produce and would share a single “brand.”
But for now, the enemies of right-wing sleaze media throughout the world can consider this at least a momentary victory.
UPDATE #1: The Economist notes a larger possible reason behind Murdoch’s extreme UK damage control. He’s trying to expand his holdings in satellite TV over there, a move that requires governmental approval. That business is far more profitable than all his UK print businesses combined.
UPDATE #2: Commentator Alison Frankel has another potential underlying reason for the Murdoch machination. She thinks Murdoch could transfer all of NOTW’s assets to a liquidation agent, who could destroy incriminating evidence.
UPDATE #3: Several U.S.-based commentators, including Will Bunch and John Nichols, insist (rightly, I believe) that Murdoch’s Fox “News” Channel is just as harmful to politics and society here as Murdoch’s papers are to politics and society across the pond. But neither Bunch nor Nichols seems to know what to do about it.
(Slow news day edition.)
Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings.
Back in the alleged good old days of American journalism, chain-owned newspapers would often be ordered by corporate HQ to run the same chainwide stories. (The Hearst papers were particularly notorious for this.)
Now, the Arizona-born company calling itself Village Voice Media has just done this at its papers, including Seattle Weekly.
They’re running the same expose piece, entitled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.” It’s an attack on Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” PR campaign, which claims “100,000 to 300,000” underage girls are trapped in street prostitution in the U.S. every year.
In contrast, the article claims the real number, while unknowable, is probably much, much smaller. The big number, says the story, comes from a highly flawed academic research piece about kids “at risk” for becoming hookers, a figure that pretty much includes the entire teen populations of U.S./Mexico border towns.
A sidebar item acknowledges a VVM corporate interest in combating anti-sex-work scare campaigns. The fear mongers pressured Craigslist to stop running (unpaid) online sex-work ads, and are now setting their rhetorical gunsights on providers of (paid) sex-work ads, including VVM and its Backpage.com site.
To summarize, the article’s “good news” is: A lot fewer girls (and boys) are underage hookers than you might think. If you hire an escort, you and she/he are breaking some laws, but most likely statutory rape isn’t one of them.
The bad news remains: There still are some minors trapped in underage hooking, even if they’re a lot rarer than Kutcher and co. claim. In Seattle we had our own highly publicized pimping scandal last year, involving a few young-adult males and perhaps a dozen underage females.
(I happen to believe escorting and other sex work should be legal, and regulated. When it is, it will be much easier for law enforcement and social workers to find underage participants, divert them into other lives (perhaps in supervised group homes), and to prosecute any madames or pimps employing them.)
•
UPDATE #1: As if right on cue, Mayor McGinn and police Lt. Eric Sano held a press briefing on Friday denouncing VVM’s Backpage.com and supporting Kutcher’s PR drive against it. Sano claimed “there have been four documented cases of child prostitution openly advertised on Backpage.com.” Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely, while not directly involved with Backpage’s operations, insists the site’s staff does all it can to reject and/or remove ads offering erotic services by under-18s.
UPDATE #2: Elsewhere in that company, the Village Voice itself has cut 60 percent of its staff in recent years. The New York weekly’s remaining employees threatened to go on strike this past week over wage and benefit cuts. Now comes word the strike may have been averted.
UPDATE #3: John Spangenthal-Lee at SeattleCrime.com said on July 5 that the VVM article was wrong about Seattle Police records concerning juvenile prostitution arrests. Spangenthal-Lee claims there were about twice as many such arrests in 2007-2009 than the article counted. Seattle Weekly managing editor Caleb Hannan, whose staff supplied research for the chainwide VVM article, told Publicola they got their numbers from the SPD.
UPDATE #4: The Sex Workers Outreach Project, an organization supporting legal and civil rights for sex workers, issued a statement “responding” to the VVM story. The statement approves of the article’s reality-checking regarding the extent of the situation. But SWOP goes on to state the real issue here isn’t Kutcher vs. VVM and Backpage.com:
…There are three overlapping issues here: the trafficking of youth into the sex industry, the service needs of youth with experience trading sex for survival and the rights of consenting adult sex workers.
UPDATE #5: Ryan Hodgson pointed me in the direction of a Seattle Weekly item from last October. It seems that before the Kutcher Krusade or the chainwide VVM counterattack, SW editors publicized the FBI’s claim that Seattle was “Ranked Worst City in U.S. for Child Prostitution.”
If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.†Have more dignity than that.
Is it hypocritical for me to insult a politician or pundit as a “corporate whore,” when I have respect and admiration for actual whores?
This hour (as I’m writing this), Qwest Field (home of the Seahawks and Sounders FC) has officially been rechristened CenturyLink Field, after the telecom giant that took over the mourned-by-nobody Qwest.
It’s as good an official date as any to mark the end of the last of the Baby Bells, the seven regional landline phone companies created with the fed-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. (The other six re-merged into Verizon and “the New AT&T.”)
Pacific Northwest Bell was one of three old AT&T units spun off as “US West.” It was a phone company, run by phone company people, as the communications world began to change all around it. All was fine and dull for a decade and a half.
Then came Phillip Anschutz. I’ve mentioned the California mogul before here, principally in connection with his link to local anti-evolution advocates and to his ownership of the Examiner.com content-mill sites (which rely on “news” stories from unpaid writers).
Anschutz had bought the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1996, just so he could lay fiber-optic phone and data lines across its rights of way. When he sold off SP to the Union Pacific, he attained permission to lay lines along UP’s rights of way as well. Since this was the digital age, these lines could transmit voice, video, and data; though Qwest’s original principal business was long-distance phone service.
To further his business-to-business communications plans, Anschutz bought US West in 2000. Not long after came the complaints by local phone customers. Qwest was “slamming” home users, switching their long distance service to its own subsidiary without permission. Qwest telemarketed like crazy, calling customers at all hours to repeatedly offer its (weak, costly) cell phone add-on plans. Qwest underfunded its regulated landline business, to the point that it couldn’t install phone lines in new subdivisions on time. Unlike AT&T and Verizon, Qwest didn’t get into the cable TV business.
(On the plus side, Qwest refused to go along when the Bush-era National Security Agency asked phone companies to hand over records of everybody’s phone calls, for wiretapping purposes.)
Now, Qwest’s data, landline-voice, and business telecommunications services are owned by the company formerly known as Central Telephone, then Century Telephone (or “CenturyTel”). As an acquirer of other companies’ landline territories, CenturyLink already covered more square miles in Washington and Oregon than Qwest had serviced.
Oh, and some of us still remember another “Qwest”—the old record label run by ex-Seattleite Quincy Jones. Jones has announced he’s using the name again, now that nobody else is.
The next historic Seattle building to be threatened isn’t a funky little structure in the way of some massive retail/residential complex. It’s Harborview Hall, a gorgeous 1931 Art Deco tower, part of the original Harborview Medical Center complex. King County wants to raze the 10-story landmark and replace it with a flat plaza. I’ve heard worse civic planning ideas, but not recently.
Last November, Capitol Hill resident Ferdous Ahmed appeared in a full page photograph in City Arts magazine. He was dressed to the proverbial nines in a vintage black suit, top hat, sunglasses, and high-top boots, accessorized with a gold pocket watch.
A lifelong vintage-wear fan and collector, Ahmed had just opened a boutique on East Olive Way the month before. It specialized in outfitting “steampunk” afficianados in suitably outlandish retro costumery, with garments and accessories mixed and matched from assorted real-world times and places (though mostly of a Victorian sensibility).
Ahmed’s boutique, Capitol Hill Vaudeville, is gone now.
The Solara Building, where the store had been, is mostly vacated (except for a tattoo studio). Entrepreneurs Shanon Thorson and Laura Olson (the team behind Po Dog on Union Street and the Grim bar on 11th Avenue), in partnership with Alex Garcia (Emerson Salon, Banyan Branch Marketing), are turning the place into The Social, a mammoth (3,000 square feet) gay bar and restaurant. Construction crews are now reshaping the building’s interior to sport a dining room and at least four semi-detached bar areas.
Olson and her partners are keeping the tattoo studio on the premises during the construction period, and say they want to bring back some of the building’s other former tenants (including a hair salon and a role-playing game store) in its peripheral spaces.
Ahmed’s boutique, though, might not get invited back. It was just getting off the ground as a business when it got sent packing. Harem, another clothing shop that had been in the Solara (and had previously been in its own storefront on Broadway), is definitely not returning; owner Victoria Landis has held her liquidation sale and is moving on.
Two features had made the Solara ideal for merchants like Landis and Ahmed.
The first was the interior flexibility of its main floor. It featured a big open space, where the gaming store could hold tournaments and the boutiques could hold fashion shows and receptions, without having to pay full time for the extra square footage.
The second was the relatively low rent. None of the Solara’s tenants had its own street-facing storefront. Without this means to attract casual foot traffic, in a building that was already set back from the street by a small parking strip, the tenants had to draw their clientele with clever promotion to identifiable niche markets. The building’s low rents were priced accordingly, to allow these specialty destination spaces to exist.
But a couple of alt-fashion boutiques and a gaming parlor just can’t bring in the kind of money a destination restaurant, and especially a bar/nightclub, can potentially generate.
Thus, the Hill is getting a new, high profile gay club. Olive Way, in particular, is getting another stop on what’s quickly shaping up as the Hill’s next major bar-crawling scene.
And we’re losing an experiment in providing urban spaces for highly specialized retail, the first experiment of its kind here since the Seattle Independent Mall (on East Pike a decade ago.)
Any “artistic” neighborhood needs some cheaper spaces within its mix. Spaces where the unexpected can happen, where new subcultures can form, where new concepts can germinate.
I was reminded of this when I read the University of Washington Press’s new essay collection Seattle Geographies. One of its longer chapters is entitled “Queering Gay Space.”
The chapter’s authors (Michael Brown, Sean Wang, and Larry Knopp) noted that Capitol Hill hadn’t always been the region’s gay culture nexus. In the first half of the last century, gay and lesbian bars, cabarets, and residential homes existed, with varying degrees of “out”-ness, mainly in Pioneer Square, plus a few scattered spots throughout the downtown core and in the University District and Queen Anne.
But when gay pride first really took off in the early 1970s, the Boeing Bust had depressed housing prices throughout the region. The Hill’s housing prices were further held back by what the essay’s authors called “white flight and fears of inner-city decay.” That gave the Hill a “large number of affordable apartments and rooms in shared houses,” which “drew young queer baby boomers into the area.”
The Hill’s desirability as a place to live, aided in part by then-low housing costs, helped spur its growth as a place for gay businesses and hangouts; and also as a place for bohemian art, theater, and fashion scenes.
Thus, four decades later, it can sprout a venture as monumental as The Social.
(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)
While Hooters may be gone from Seattle now, there are now several other “breastaurant” chains now serving up sports-bar food via low-cut waitress costumes around the country.
And one of them even uses the name “Twin Peaks,” with no permission from David Lynch (thanks to the vagaries of trademark law).
(Thanx and hat tip to Ronald Holden.)
Most of the Hooters restaurants in Washington, including the Seattle location at south Lake Union, are now closed. The parent company insists it’s not due to any lessened popularity in the chain’s concept. It’s just the matter of a regional franchisee that got into a lawsuit with an unspecified “third party.”
This sort of thing has happened before. Here in the late 1990s, a multistore Burger King franchisee suddenly folded.
Of course this could be an opportunity for some new, all local cleavage-themed restaurant. Perhaps with a neo-burlesque concept. After all, there’s nothing either novel or trademarkable about low-cut waitress costumes. The idea goes back at least as far as the serving wenches in English country inns. (And sometimes the food at Hooters tasted almost as old.)
