City Pages is sold, splits from sex ad-linked Backpage

City Pages is sold, splits from sex ad-linked Backpage

• Article by: KRISTIN TILLOTSON , Star Tribune
• Updated: September 24, 2012 - 10:21 AM

City Pages has been sold to a former executive of its previous owner, Village Voice Media Holdings LLC, and is being split from backpage.com.
The Twin Cities alternative weekly, along with the 12 other weeklies under the VVM umbrella, have been bought out by former VVM managers led by chief operating officer Scott Tobias, who have formed a new Denver-based company called Voice Media Group.
The weeklies had been the subject of criticism by government officials as well as citizen protests and advertiser pressure for their links to backpage.com, the nation's largest forum for sex-services ads since Craigslist stopped accepting them. Backpage is also owned by Village Voice Media, which will continue to run the site.
Tobias told Reuters that "Backpage and the noise around it was without question a distraction."  He added that while the weeklies will continue to accept adult-section ads, their numbers are "extremely small at this point."
Larkin and Lacey, the founders of VVM Holdings, released a statement saying they were ready to hand the reins of the 13 weeklies over "to a new generation of writers, editors and publishers."
Other weeklies purchased in the deal include the Village Voice in New York; Westword in Denver; New Times in Phoenix, Miami and Broward, Fla.; Houston Press; Observer in Dallas; Riverfront Times in St. Louis, and OC Weekly in southern California.
Of particular controversy have been Backpage ads that police say are promoting underage sex trafficking. The Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils as well as the Hennepin and Ramsey county attorneys recently publicly asked Backpage to halt such ads.
Minneapolis police Sgt. Grant Snyder, who has linked Backpage to more than 20 child sex-trafficking cases in the metro area this year, recently told the Star Tribune that the website is "the marketing side of a triangular relationship with demand and supply. Every pimp, john and victim I talk to says Backpage is synonymous with online prostitution."
Backpage.com will "become the centerpiece of a new online classified advertising company with business worldwide," the statement said.  Copy www.startribune.com