It's amazing how many people have been conned by Shaun King

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Shaun King Keeps Raising Money, and Questions About Where It Goes

He blamed issues at The North Star on over-ambition, but seven former employees of the site King launched with great fanfare painted a darker picture.

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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 totaled more than $125,000 monthly, or $1.5 million a year, per figures tweeted by both King and The North Star. 

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.

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