Shaun King Keeps Raising Money, and Questions About Where It Goes
This story is almost a book of his deception, the people that surround him all it. Someone needs to step in maybe the FBI and look into what is going on.
hen Shaun King and progressive journalist Benjamin Dixon launched an ambitious multimedia reboot of Frederick Douglass’s abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, last February, it was celebrated across social media by prominent voices including Susan Sarandon, Michael Eric Dyson and Megan Mullally. A month later, the company boasted on Twitter that it already had “multiple angel investors” and more than 30,000 subscribers contributing $5 per month for students and $10 a month and up for the general public.
Subscribers at the highest giving levels, according to one former employee I spoke with, included Sigourney Weaver, Brené Brown, and black billionaire philanthropist Robert Smith, who gave a healthy $10,000 a month. If every single subscriber gave at the lowest $5 a month “student plan” level, subscriber revenue totalled more than $125,000 monthly, or $1.5 million a year, per figures tweeted by both King and The North Star.
“Remember — this is not just the cost of membership — we are going to be building multiple studios and offices and will be hiring nearly 50 world class journalists and staffers for The North Star,” King wrote in a fundraising letter last November. “We are going to be launching a full news website, an iPhone & Android app, four brand new podcasts, online video news broadcasts, and so much more. We are building The North Star together.”
The North Star was created 171 years ago by abolitionists to guide the nation toward freedom. Today I am joining @shaunking, @BenjaminPDixon and Team at https://t.co/ZvVk1DxXdK to rebuild it. Click the link to join the launch team too. https://t.co/pj2Ikakspi
— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) November 3, 2018
But 14 months after launching, almost none of what King promised to build has appeared and the site has struggled with issues that alienated many subscribers. The headquarters and television studio was quietly shuttered last summer, and all Atlanta-based staffers laid off. The mobile app disappeared for over a year, and the “full news site” displays branded The North Star apparel for sale alongside relatively scant original journalism.
King told me in an extensive email exchange for this story in early April that The North Star’s stumbles, including the dearth of deliverables promised, can be chalked up to the same overzealousness that has been the downfall of his other projects—the result of his tendency to take on too much, too soon.
“When we launched The North Star, virtually every advisor I had insisted that we should not do written articles, podcasts, and video news at the same time,” King wrote. “I just knew we could do it. They were right.”
But seven former employees of The North Star — three of whom spoke anonymously out of fear of reprisal by King, and six of whom were told they had to sign non-disclosure agreements to receive severances — said the issue was less King’s over-ambition than his absenteeism, insistence on absolute control, and radical incompetence. They said he had little interest in feedback from staffers he had ostensibly brought on for their lengthy resumes and media experience, despite his own lack of the same. Two iterations of broadcast news shows were scrapped, and their staffs and hosts fired, before they ever aired, and Dixon was pushed out even as money poured in and the site remained underpopulated.
More a lot more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/shaun-king-keeps-raising-money-and-questions-about-where-it-goes-3