The tech owners who are buying Salon finally wrapped up their $5 million acquisition, and promoted former Deputy Editor Erin Keane to editor-in-chief.
The deal, which will be announced Wednesday, was sealed with a $650,000 cash payment on Aug. 30, which followed a $500,000 payment in March, when the tentative pact was first unveiled. As part of the deal, the sellers will receive a $3.85 million loan payable over two years.
When the deal was initially disclosed in May, the new owners were identified only as Salon.com LLC. Media Ink first disclosed at the time that the principals behind Salon.com LLC were Chris Richmond and Drew Schoentrup, who also own Proper Media, which provides software and ad support to publishers — and which happens to be involved in a bitter legal dispute over a past bid for Snopes.com.
Richmond said that, with the completion of the Salon deal, he promoted Keane as she had been running the day-to-day operations since former CEO Jordan Hoffner, who also held the EIC title, resigned on May 3. He received a severance payment of $30,000, according to the latest SEC filing.
The husband-and-wife team of Barbara and David Mikkelson founded Snopes, a fact-checking website, in the mid-1990s. But in the midst of a bitter divorce from her husband, Barbara sold her stake to Proper Media in September 2016.
As the antagonism between David Mikkelson and Proper Media intensified, Proper Media allegedly withheld the ad revenues it was collecting on behalf of Snopes. Mikkelson started a GoFundMe page to stay afloat and has continued to control the site while the court battle rages.
Last month, a judge in California state court blocked many of the Proper Media complaints from proceeding in part because their role as plaintiffs and shareholders meant they were effectively trying to sue themselves. “The court also said Schoentrup and Richmond are precluded from derivatively bringing causes of action against me for corporate waste and breach of fiduciary duty because they ‘have hostile interests that disqualify them as adequate representatives of Snopes,’ ” Mikkelson told Media Ink.
The court did, however, say Proper Media’s request for punitive damages could move forward, Schoentrup noted.