ST. LOUIS — The new face of what remains of the Riverfront Times has revealed himself, sort of.
In a social media thread from the RFT’s account Thursday morning, a man identifying himself as Jonathan “JD” Davis claimed he was the new executive editor of the former alternative weekly newspaper that abruptly shut down in May.
He said he believed the RFT could “thrive,” and he defended the former news site’s recent slew of content promoting pornography on OnlyFans, arguing advertising dollars from such articles will keep other content on the RFT free.
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Jonathan “JD” Davis claims to be the new editor of the Riverfront Times.
It’s unclear if Davis is the new owner of the publication and its website or just working to produce and aggregate content. His LinkedIn page says he spent 10 years working at Los Angeles-based engineering and manufacturing firm NEOTech, and it claims he founded executive search firm HireBetter and baseball scheduling service UmpHub in Austin, Texas.
Kimberly Davis, who is listed as founder and CEO of Austin-based runner health services firm RunLab, says on her company’s website that she married Davis in 2014 and describes him as a “serial entrepreneur.”
Former RFT owner Chris Keating, who took sole ownership of the site in August 2023, has said he is bound by a confidentiality agreement from revealing the publication’s buyer. The sale prompted the immediate layoff of the RFT’s 11 staff employees and ended a nearly 50-year run of providing area readers a mix of food, bar and music coverage alongside longform journalism.
For months, there was little hint about the new owner. A few articles on national topics, likely generated by artificial intelligence, popped up in the weeks following the sale but then disappeared. Then, in recent weeks, content promoting adult entertainment subscription service OnlyFans began appearing on RFT’s site. The posts promote women selling pornography on OnlyFans and lump them into “best of” categories based mostly on race or country of origin.
Davis addressed the use of OnlyFans content in his online post, saying that 500,000 people use Google to search for new OnlyFans “content creators” every day.
“My stance for RFT is that OnlyFans is a safe platform for self-expression,” Davis wrote. “It’s both wildly popular (200m users) and entirely legal. Building an editorial library that genuinely serves the people who are seeking out new Content Creators is an incredible business opportunity and we’re going to work hard to make ours the best. When my team writes helpful articles about topics like OnlyFans Creators and Weed, advertisers LOVE IT because it’s a great place for them to spend their budgets and get solid returns.”
Other former alt-weekly news sites such as the storied Village Voice and LA Weekly are also turning to OnlyFans content aggregation to boost traffic on “zombie” websites that produce few if any local articles.
Davis claimed the RFT will still produce content about local venues and activities. He posted two on Wednesday. One was headlined “5 things you must eat when in Chicago.” The other, “Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know,” incorrectly identifies Tony Faust as the founder of Anheuser-Busch and claims Busch Stadium is planning an expansion.
“The historical writing on the site was aggressively opinionated, fraught with author bias and overwhelmingly negative,” Davis wrote in his online post. “As a result, fewer people were reading it today than at any time in the last half century!… I get to ensure this is a publication that can be held up as a shining example for liberty. There will be sections on our site that you may want to visit to learn about a new band or find where the nearest Farmers’ Market is.”
Davis appears to have libertarian leanings. He reposted a video clip of Argentina’s eccentric libertarian president Javier Milei giving a speech and wrote: “I wish we could vote for him.” He also follows several accounts focused on online entrepreneurship and search engine optimization.
His LinkedIn profile says Davis is based here. He could not be reached for comment.
View life in St. Louis through the Post-Dispatch photographers’ lenses. Edited by Jenna Jones.
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