404 Media
The Area Code Not the Error Code
Today was April 4th, which Atlanta boosters, including the Metro Chamber of Commerce, have turned into a holiday to celebrate the city’s authentic culture symbolized by its original area code.
Part of that culture is relentless boosterism. From Henry Grady’s New South to Forward Atlanta to Too Busy to Hate to Every Day is An Opening Day.
The origin of 404 Day in 2022 was as a scholarship drive for local HBCU’s so it’s not all a gimmick, and as someone of Irish descent who dutifully downs a Guiness each St. Patrick’s Day, I’m not above such events.
But it’s also a good time for some self-reflection and to ask whether boosterism and business interests drown out other types of discourse in the 404.
And who our media serves.
Are we a city or a market? Citizens or consumers?
The Area Code That’s an Error Code
404 Media is a “journalist-founded digital media company” covering technology that takes its name not from the area code but the error code message 404 Page Not Found often seen when clicking on dead links.
The founders are all veterans of Vice in New York and, according to a New York Times profile, their site is already profitable even as Vice has gone bankrupt.
While its name refers to the error rather than area code, an early story was about Atlanta-based Cox Media and one of its marketing team’s claims of “active listening” to smart devices.
The story shows a skepticism towards marketing and its invasion into all aspects of our lives rarely found in Cox’s hometown.
It’s the kind of story legacy local media isn’t designed to dig up but also hasn’t followed up on despite the local connection. For me it was another bullet point in my ongoing thesis that Cox is unaccountable in Atlanta media.
As a niche outlet, 404 Media benefits from its smaller scale and limited focus on popular topics like internet culture. But fans and connections brought over from Vice, which was very high-profile, help.
Cooperatives are one alternative to both for-profit media and traditional non-profit outlets like public radio that still rely on corporate funding in the form of underwriting and grants.
They’re inherently small scale and won’t replace the legacy local newspapers that covered everything from school boards to sports teams to society notices. And lots of crime.
But the model is catching on even here where the Atlanta Community Press Collective started up to cover “Cop City” from an avowedly leftist perspective.
It’s mission statement states it’s an abolitionist newsroom with a goal to “provide an independent voice in a local media landscape increasingly dominated by corporate interests.”
The biggest corporate media interest in the 404 is Cox Enterprises which has dominated local news since before area codes began in 1947.
After buying the Atlanta Journal and WSB in 1939 then adding the Constitution in 1950, one company owned the largest newspaper, radio and TV stations in the same city until 2019 when Cox sold a majority stake in its broadcast stations to Apollo Global Management. Cox Enterprises retains a minority stake in Cox Media.
Apollo, dubbed the Gods of Finance by Fortune, is a private equity firm that aspires to be a trillion dollar company by 2026.
Cox, now 125 years old as a company and family dynasty, still wants massive growth too. It’s already a sprawling conglomerate with business interests far outside of journalism, from cable systems to electric vehicles to Cox Farms “a new business focused on sustainable food and agriculture.”
Whether EVs and sustainable indoor farms can truly achieve the “triple-bottom-line philosophy that strives to improve the planet, elevate human health and ensure robust financial returns” is beyond my ability to judge, but it’s the kind of grand statement and techno-optimism I’d want regularly challenged with journalistic rigor.
I doubt that will come from Atlanta.
Filling in Gaps
One of ACPC’s most recent stories was an investigative piece about the Atlanta Police Foundation’s push to expand Atlanta’s surveillance network and use the politically-connected firm Talitrix. It links to and builds on an AJC investigation about the company but adds the APF element.
Cox, the AJC’s owner, is a major donor to the APF through its Foundation and CEO Alex Taylor was a lead fundraiser for the private funding of “Cop City” as head of the CEO-heavy Atlanta Committee for Progress.
ACPC hasn’t displaced the AJC but has been an important check and balance on its framing of the discourse and has broken stories the big guys missed. Or were structured not to look for.
Benevolent Billionaires
Until recently displaced by Chik-fil-A and Home Depot founders, the Cox family had been Georgia’s richest for generations. It still boasts multiple billionaires. Individually and through their Foundations the Coxes have been major philanthropists in Atlanta funding the largest arts organizations, universities — including journalism schools and endowed professorships, medical facilities, bike trails, and more.
If Atlanta has a non-profit industrial complex, Cox is one of the biggest smokestacks.
But distrust of billionaires and their outsized influence is growing. Cox’s most virulent critic is one-time heir and self-described revolutionary communist James Cox “Fergie” Chambers.
Occasionally the subject of stories, and scorn, in right-wing outlets like the NY Post or Bari Weiss’ “heterodox” site the Free Press, Chambers was recently profiled in more mainstream and even liberal magazines.
The lengthiest and most interesting was by David Peisner writing for Roling Stone. Titled “Fergie Chambers Is Heir to One of America’s Richest Families — and Determined to See the U.S. Fall,” it’s not a flattering portrait, none of them are, but also not entirely dismissive. There’s the fascination in an heir to Dynastic wealth wanting to end Capitalism and what kind of family dynamics or influences went into that.
If you’re distrustful of billionaires, here’s a class traitor to look to but … hang on, check out his Twitter feed … uh.
American Oligarchy is getting out of hand but is communist revolution really the answer?
Are Fergie’s denouncements and direct actions good or bad? Effective or narcissistic?
Peisner also wrote sympathetically about the Cop City Forrest Defenders and Tortuguita who’s death remains a touchpoint in all sides of that saga: martyr or terrorist.
Tellingly Peisner asks Chambers if he wants to be a martyr. Peisner says of Chambers “He’s taken aback.”
Chambers’ answer is the piece’s conclusion, so I won’t crib it, but it, like the whole profile, is unsettling. Not as unsettling as the wars and violence those of us in relative comfort in Atlanta get to scroll past, but of a piece with it all. What can be done and what should be done? Locally or globally?
Are our leaders doing it? Is the media asking the right questions? But what are the alternatives?
Just ahead of the Rolling Stone piece Mother Jones released published its own, smaller profile “There’s a Communist Multimillionaire Fomenting Revolution in Atlanta” with a subtitle that hinted at its purpose “Suburban Democrats are pissed.”
This piece received considerable pushback from leftist activists in Atlanta since it framed Fergie’s as a threat to Georgia Democrats in the fall elections.
The piece includes critical comments from AJC columnist Bill Torpy and former Congresswoman Carolyn Bourdeaux who is now a paid contributor to the paper.
Beyond Fergie’s controversial statements and actions, he’s funding leftist causes in Atlanta like the Stop Cop City referendum, Community Movement Builders, and ACPC. They insist on their independence and ACPC has disclosed its funders, but if Cox money going to Atlanta institutions impacts how they see their mission, a Cox dissidents’ money may make it hard to criticize him even when warranted.
(As disclosed before, Chambers gave the bulk of a $600 crowdfund for one of my Open Records Requests related to Cox’s relationship with state-run Georgia Public Broadcasting.)
Parts of the left hate mainstream liberals more than conservatives but for Mother Jones’ readers such ideological purity will lead to Trump’s election and fascism.
But Georgia Democrats shouldn’t be dependent on the Cox Dynasty and its media outlets to win elections. In fact, they should have busted the Family Trust by now if they’re the party of the people.
The third profile was in Air Mail Magazine, a digital publication started by former Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and funded by a private equity firm. It’s the kind of outlet aimed squarely at the affluent and aristocratic. The Coxes and their courtiers.
For me, the pull quote was “a spokesperson for Cox Enterprises said, ‘We cannot comment on matters related to the family.’”
Beyond all the family drama this again raises a question for Atlanta: how do we govern ourselves when an oligarchy dominates local media, can promote or marginalize issues, is integral to both political parties’ media strategies, funds major foundations, but can’t comment when it itself is newsworthy.
The Air Mail piece goes back further to the Cox Dynasty’s origins and James M. Cox’s political career. As Democratic Gov. and presidential candidate. He was, as he described himself in his memoir, a “safe kind of liberal” the very thing leftists seem to hate more than MAGA.
There’s the glossy magazine intrigue of famous people, Fergie’s wife is “Juliane Schnabel’s daughter,” his father after divorcing his mother married Adnan Khashoggi’s daughter.
On the Dynasty’s origin it says “The Cox fortune was built by Fergie’s great-grandfather James M. Cox, who was born in a log cabin on a farm in Butler County, Ohio, in 1870, where the wind moved like a scythe across the endless steppe. He apprenticed at a newspaper in Middletown, Ohio, then followed the media train all down the line, building the newspaper-and-TV conglomerate that his great-grandson, talking to Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, would later — much later — describe as “a rotten capitalism firm like the rest of them.”
Jimmy Cox did come from humble origins but had an ambition that damaged his family as much as it built an empire. His named his first-born son, who died after just a few weeks, after his political mentor Congressman Paul Sorg who later lent him money to buy his first newspaper. He was the first Major Party Presidential nominee to be divorced. Another son was institutionalized for years. But he was for the League of Nations.
(I’d hoped to finish this piece on 404 but there’s more so I’ll post this now and follow up on 405 or 6.)
Edit: Part 2 was posted April 6th: https://brianpbannon.medium.com/404-media-part-2-d459b52cdd45
