ST. LOUIS — The Riverfront Times was sold in May and the staff was laid off. The newspaper’s website and social media have appeared mostly dormant since then. Although there has been something odd going on in the background at this former alt-weekly and others across the United States. Now, we may have more answers after a post to the RFT’s Twitter account.
Tweets from the main account are from the new executive editor, JD Davis. He says in the thread that he has a plan to save the Riverfront Times.
“I love the challenge of solving huge issues and right now the legacy publishing world is dying. I didn’t take this role just to keep RFT on life support while operating at a loss. I believe it can thrive,” states Davis on X. “The historical writing on the site was aggressively opinionated, fraught with author bias and overwhelmingly negative. As a result, fewer people were reading it today than at any time in the last half century!”
Davis says that he does not plan on printing any new editions of the paper but plans to keep the website up-to-date. There will be local news updates, information about events like farmer’s markets, and the section about marijuana legalization will remain active. He says that the comment section is going away and readers, “can enjoy the site without thinking we have an agenda.”
There has been something odd going on for months behind the scenes. Keen observers of the paper’s RSS feeds have noticed articles with links to OnlyFans accounts published online. Many of these posts are buried on the website. There were 18 articles published Wednesday, and 16 of them are related to porn. The titles of the other two public articles are, “5 Things You Must Eat When in Chicago” and “Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know.”
“From what I can tell, no one else is writing content that is so trustworthy, well-researched or current that someone who is searching for new creators is happy with what they find. My stance for RFT is that OnlyFans is a safe platform for self-expression. It’s both wildly popular (200m users) and entirely legal,” states Davis.
A reporter for Wired.com explains that this isn’t just happening in St. Louis. Kate Knibbs says that there are several prominent alt-weekly newspapers in the U.S. featuring search-engine-optimized porn listicles. These also include the Village Voice, and LA Weekly. The new owners seem to be using them to boost web traffic and potentially attract digital ad revenue.
It remains unclear how much of this content is AI-generated or if any financial agreements are behind the OnlyFans promotions. A former Village Voice writer tells Wired that the shift towards such content is seen as a grim outcome for struggling media publications.
Note: Video in this report is from May, 2024.
