I started this business in April 2011. I had a vision of building a publishing company with many decentralized aspects including a fully remote and independent staff of freelancers and barter contributors to websites, magazines and online newspapers.
LMP Background Just Like Facebook: A College Project
I was quietly preparing for this transition because it was the idea for my Independent Study curriculum at Minnesota State University back in 2008, when I was made aware that I was 1 credit short to graduate with my BS in Mass Communications and minor in Technical Communication. I was supposed to graduate in 2007 but the admissions department found this error. I couldn't qualify for financial aid for one single measly credit, so I hatched this scheme with my advisor to create an independent media project that REQUIRED me to stack my spring semester with 12 credits from another institution under a consortium agreement. Under the proposed terms, I would use 12 credits of course work, the minimum required load to be considered full-time, at Riverland Community College. I created a curriculum based on the Computer Science curriculum at Riverland to create a fully functional digital media project for the one-credit independent study program at MNSU. Digital media wasn't seen as a serious media back then and my whole college curriculum was designed for traditional media - newspapers, radio and television. But I was a Millennial of the Internet age. I started that project just a few short years after joining a new and growing competitor to MySpace - Facebook. My media project was a website that encompassed all forms of media for the purposes of news, information and entertainment, walled off by sections that were obvious to the user.
Evolution
In college, I coded an entire news network in HTML and this was in 2007-08. I graduated with my BS, Magna Cum Laude in 2008. I completed an internship at Southwest Newspapers Group in the Twin Cities. It was a modern company with young leaders in publishing that saw the web as a frontier. They weren't afraid of digital. They embraced it. They were experimenting with growing several online information services in the Southwest Suburbs of Minneapolis where they operated. I was also freelancing for other publications and media services like Mill City Scene, a local Hip Hop website; Twin Cities El Heraldo, a local startup print Spanish/English newspaper; Stillwater Gazette; Two Fish Recording Studios/No Alternative Media/Static Magazine; Jay Newman Legal Proofreading and new growing online media like AOL and Examiner. I had diverse experiences from the very beginning, but I was dead broke still and nothing full-time. I was still a line cook at Green Mill cooking for packed houses back then, coming home covered in Italian food, as my main source of income, with 5 other roommates in Brooklyn Center, MN. I was participating in clinical trials for extra cash. While there, I received a call from a Managing Editor of the Roswell Daily Record in New Mexico - yes, THAT Roswell, NM with the famous UFO crash from the 1940s. They needed a crime reporter. I was all in and took the job immediately and moved there with nothing but a Honda Passport filled with clothes and some essentials. My first journalism adventure. It would hardly be the last over a more than two decade long career in the field. I worked in New Mexico for a year and the Great Recession happened and I had my own personal turmoil on top of it. While there, I managed to shoot HD videos, work on the RDR website with a terrific web developer and share some amazing times with my colleagues there. I returned to MN in 2009 and worked as an editor of a newspaper that covered several rural communities. 2011 was when I decided to take my professional experience and combine it with my college project and launch LMP.
Going Digital
Print media wasn't entirely dead yet back then. Minneapolis City Pages was competing with Vita.mn until the Star Tribune, who owned the latter, bought City Pages and shut both of them down. City Pages was historic in Minneapolis and was an arm of Village Voice media, which eventually become culturally replaced by the likes of Vice Media and others. I was publishing a similar rag called Slanted Magazine Southern Minnesota Arts & Culture. The name came from this apartment I lived in that had a slanted floor so my office chair would roll away while I was working sometimes. The magazine had a technology section and we were visibly very visually focused, modern, appealing to counter-culture (including youth and the Internet) and we published free content online and had a digital edition of ISSUU. LMP also published several local online newspapers and eventually acquired the company that created the CMS system for this and we own it to this day. The vision for going totally digital was always there but we had to transition and take the dollars that were coming from traditional media. We also ran ads for twice-monthly comedy shows and acquired management of the venue where they took place. Other local media were taking their cues from us. The business model was never good for print. We never made a profit from 2011-2014 from the print side - ever. But we broke even and created a foundation. To pay the bills, I started freelancing myself for tech companies, agencies, publishers and anyone looking for expert content and I had built a knowledge of SEO and web development already. I had an operation where I freelanced for bigger firms like Best Buy, Thomson Reuters, Tech Times, Popular Mechanics, Western Digital, Legal Newsline, etc. and published content on 20+ websites in the evening that were part of LMP. All of my freelance contracts were also part of LMP. Then I got DDoS attacked and malware attacked because my security was non-existent. This was during the Anonymous and WikiLeaks era that we reported on actively so it was due to my own lack of cybersecurity, not following my own principles that was partly to blame. Apparently, some Russian or Eastern Europeans and Asians didn't likely appreciate some of my news reporting, likely on The Drug War Times website that detailed global corruption among several countries in relation to drug cartels in Mexico and Central/South America. I'm sure Big Pharma wasn't too pleased with us either. We were easy to target. We were essentially censored due to the cost to operate with the required security to run all those sites simultaneously. There were also server and cloud issues to contend with, mainly dependent on centralized systems. Much of the business though was and still is run on digital payments including PayPal and other services like Upwork and so forth.
The Lightbulb Moment
It happened in 2013, I believe. That was the spark that lit the fire but the conditions were ripe already. Let me explain. In December 2012, I published an article in Slanted Magazine Southern Minnesota Arts & Culture in both print and online about a new type of digital currency. It was called Bitcoin and it was the world's first "cryptocurrency". And weirder yet, it was decentralized digital money with an anonymous mysterious founder named Satoshi Nakamoto. I commissioned the article from Michael P. Carney and I haven't heard from him since the article was published. I knew about Bitcoin before Carney's article but I loved my philosophical discussions with him (he was admittedly more socialist than libertarian) and my magazine was all about diversity. We both seemed to agree that Bitcoin was neutral politically and hence, potentially transformative for a variety of reasons. We talked a bit about AI back then too. But in 2013, Netflix, a trendy new company that disrupted broadcast video the world over, debuted a documentary about Bitcoin called Banking on Bitcoin and my FOMO instinct kicked in at the exact moment the ideals of Bitcoin hit me like a lightbulb image above my cranium: BUY!
Enter Bitcoin
My entire blockchain and web3 journey started in Bitcoin but media brought me there. In 2013, when I bought Bitcoin to use rather than burn in an experiment (yes, I burned several actual whole BTC tokens messing around with them and either losing the keys or sending for stupid stuff!), it was the day that documentary aired on Netflix. Again, it was media that really set the fire. I had $5 to my name at the time. Rent of $550 was due the next day. I had no idea where I would get the rent either. Then I saw the documentary was about the air. I wasted no time. I bought Bitcoin with my last $5. That $5 turned into several thousand. Then I began to understand the vision. I could use BTC as leverage against USD, the currency that was keeping me and the working class from the Occupy Wall Street movement poor. That turned my focus to other use cases for Blockchain as more projects sprang up. No doubt there were scammers and rug pulls and stupid monkey GIFs selling for millions. So what. During some of the most repressive times, including during COVID lockdowns, BTC became not only a savings vehicle, but a useful tool for economics coupled with free speech. It allowed for a backdoor out of tyrannical systems. That is power the public has yet to realize. BTC is not just about transaction. It's about trust. It's about democracy. Other cryptos will offer the utility in the digital economy with smart contracts, distributed compute/services, payment rails, network fees, governance, consensus, bridging, DeFi and much more. But BTC remains politically neutral, decentralized, sovereign and public intentionally. It isn't private or cloaked. That utility is offered by so-called privacy coins like Monero and Dash. Publishing is one of the major areas of opportunity for web3 to flourish but other technologies pose both risk and potential for reward.
What's Next?
As AI develops further, I think it will be necessary for human survival to nearly completely decentralize it the way Bitcoin has been developed but likely with government regulation and public policy backbones layered above that to enforce it in the code of law. AI is likely to become essential public infrastructure.