James Larkin

James Larkin, who helped turn the Phoenix alternative weekly New Times into a chain that took over the venerated Village Voice in New York, died by suicide Monday July 31 2023, days before a federal trial on charges he knowingly used online classified ads to facilitate prostitution. He was 74. Michael Lacey and James Larkin originally built a small empire of alternative newspapers across the country. In 1977, the two bought out the other owners of the Phoenix New Times and began it anew with Lacey as editor and Larkin as publisher. In 1983, they acquired Westword in Denver, and over the next 15 years, added papers in Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2005, they bought the parent company of the venerable Village Voice in New York. Lacey and Larkin were also the subjects of a late-night raid and arrest in 2007 in what was widely viewed as a politically motivated arrest by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies after the New Times published details of a grand-jury matter. They sued and received a $3.75 million settlement from Maricopa County in 2013, and donated $2 million of that to Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In September 2012, Lacey and co-owner Larkin agreed to sell their newspaper company to a newly created company owned by a group of the papers' editors and publishers. The men retained their interest in Backpage, a site they had founded in 2004. Larkin and Lacey faced federal trial in 2021 in a proceeding that was set to see prosecutors call two former Backpage executives to testify that the website was essentially an online brothel. The website’s CEO, Carl Ferrer, had admitted that the website was designed to aid in facilitating prostitution. He had pleaded guilty in 2018 on behalf of both himself and the Backpage website. U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial. She said prosecutors had gone too far in eliciting emotional testimony regarding child sex trafficking, rather than proving the facts in the indictment. A retrial in the case was set to start Aug. 8 2023 before Judge Diane Humetewa.