Santa Barbara's collective memory, sold for kindling
independent.com
independent.com
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.
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
There has to be a great story as to how these two news sites in the same town got such high-quality domains.
The controversy you are referencing happened last fall, years after that team had left.
Currently Defector is trying hard to occupy the gap left by it.
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...
most people here will be familiar with his writing for motherboard.
Huh? It's just a domain name. None of the history in none of the archives is going away.
> 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.
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.
So if there was a change of ownership, the IQN would change.
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...
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.
In fact, "legal" often means "brazen thievery, but rich and entitled people doing it so that's okay".
If you don't protect against this sort of behavior, public confidence erodes and eventually the system collapses because nobody's actually producing anything; they're just scamming each other.
Once the rich own everything, your country's productivity and competitiveness falls through the floor (banana republic) because nobody doing the actual work has anything left to strive for other than subsistence.
Think of it this way. You build a business over 40 years, accumulating value along the way. You would be crazy to leave all that accumulated value in a high-risk entity (which a business naturally is.) So periodically the value is separated from the risk.
So, for example, a business owning the building is nuts. The building is a different asset class, and should be in its own structure. Any reasonable new owner who acquires a business and building in one bite will move to separate them.
This is not scammy or fraud, its the ways things are done and should be done by the original owner.
Progressives' general anti-business bias blinds them to the need to protect small to medium businesses from the true capitalist evils such as vulture capitalists. Things like rent control could be useful tools for protecting communities from the devastation that can be caused by financial engineering preying on real businesses.
Thus keeping them bound together makes things worse for employees and customers, not better.
Separating them makes it worse for creditors. Specifically creditors are less likely to institute bankruptcy if there are no juicy assets to liquidate. Most small businesses can survive a cash squeeze, at least for a short while, as long as creditors don't preemptively move to shut it down.
Equally, business owners are less tempted to over-extend if there is less "equity in the business". Obviously they can still borrow against the asset, but that's then a conscious decision.
Of course large companies know all this, and do it. Yhe way to protect small businesses from predatory buyouts or creditors is to educate small business owners.
Insider trading isn't illegal everywhere, and it's not even illegal for the same reasons in different jurisdictions. (Specifically, I know that the reasons are different in eg France and the US.)
> If you don't protect against this sort of behavior, public confidence erodes and eventually the system collapses because nobody's actually producing anything; they're just scamming each other.
That would be easy to test: compare different market with different degrees and kinds of 'protection' against the ills you mention, and see how confidence differs. I doubt you'll find the kind of correlation you are asserting here. (But, of course, we need to watch out for correlation vs causation.)
You don't even need to look at different countries: even in the same country different assets are often traded under different rules. Eg equities vs bonds vs commodities vs commodity futures etc in the US.
There are a lot of the cases when the law requires arm's-length transactions, and those transactions definitely aren't arm's-length.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vi_Senior_Living#Litigation
[2] https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/02/19/residents-sue-palo-al...
If you're going to go after a retirement community, I can't think of a worst place. It's actually on Sand Hill Road. Talk about potentially connected people, and people with deep pockets, or whose friends may have deep pockets.
Burton Richter, 82, is among the affected residents. In 2005, the 1976 Nobel Laureate in Physics paid an entrance fee of roughly $1.59 million, 90 percent of which was supposed to be refundable.
Brilliant. Steal from millionaires and multimillionaires. No possible way they'd be able to hire lawyers. No way their friends and family could.
Well, hopefully this does indeed work as a usable judgement in other circumstances.
Retirement communities are housing, and more of course. Yet housing is well protected, so whatever legislation protects such homes should be expanded it seems.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Throw this on the heap of systemic ethical transgressions of the advertising industry, along with list selling, poor targeting practices, ...
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.
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.
> 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.
No escriblo para papel de espanol porque my idoima esta basura!
So this is less a question of whether the residents can pay, but rather whether the residents value this archive at all.
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.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.
There’s also the print archives, which are not available online.
It’s kind of what you signed up for when you started running a newspaper or news website.
No. I didn't actually. I probably signed up to produce (hopefully) quality journalism. But I didn't sign up to be an archive for the ages. And I'm not sure how I would even do so after I'm no longer there and have no revenues or employees. I can donate paper copies to the local library but that's basically just kicking the can down the road given that local libraries don't have infinite resources or space to maintain collections and, in fact, routinely sell off books that aren't checked out.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.montecitojournal.net
etc.
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?
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.
Holding it for ransom is one "good" use for it.