AI-generated local news has been part of the Greater Boston scene for a while. Among the more prominent examples is South Shore News, which actually charges a subscription fee for readers who want to keep up with municipal government meetings in the 19 communities that it reaches.
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In just the past month or two, though, I’ve noticed a sudden uptick. We’ve gone from a few AI outlets here and there to a plethora, often competing with organic startup projects. Now Maggie Scales, a reporter for The Lexington Observer, has taken their measure, noting that there are four AI networks in Lexington alone — the Lexington-Concord Courier, Nanopress, Townbrief and GatherGov.
“To put it bluntly, I think it’s garbage,” Jesse Floyd, editor-in-chief of The Belmont Voice, told Scales.
What Scales found is hardly limited to Greater Boston. In just the past few days, the Columbia Journalism Review has documented a pink-slime war in Ohio, while the nonprofit news outlet Billy Penn has reported on an explosion of AI-generated news in the Philadelphia area. It’s part of an ongoing phenomenon in which purveyors of low-quality content seek to take advantage of the local-news crisis — only now they’re moving into communities that are already well-served by outlets that employ actual journalists.
The Courier, Scales reports, is part of a venture called Surround Sound Media, which has 175 outlets nationwide tended to by just 12 employees, described as “producers.” Scales’ efforts to obtain comment from Surround Sound went unanswered, but she documented several examples of reporting by LexObserver later being picked up by the Courier. Scales writes:
[D]espite all of its content being written by AI, Courier uses bylines that read, “By Lexington Concord Courier Staff.” If a reader didn’t take it upon themselves to read Courier’s “About” page, the only place on the site where it is disclosed that all posts are written by AI, they might assume “staff” means humans.
The other three ventures, she notes, do not claim to be news outlets. Townbrief and GatherGov use AI to summarize and report on governmental meetings, while Nanopress rounds up information from a variety of sources, including news outlets, to produce community-specific newsletters.
I was among those whom Scales interviewed, and I said that the biggest problem with AI local news is that its purveyors can’t provide the true value of community journalism: serving as an engine of civic engagement. I told her:
Be at the farmers’ markets, organize events, serve as a public forum, give people a chance to meet and greet your journalists, and be really a part of the fabric of the community? That’s something that AI will never be able to do.
In Philadelphia, reporters and
At least three journalists on the centraljersey.com site had stories under their author pages that they did not write and photos that were not of them — one of whom was WHYY’s own Ken Downey Jr.
“That’s not me,” Downey said when he saw his author page.
They also found examples of AI sites copying language from Billy Penn almost word for word.
In Ohio, both Democratic- and Republican-oriented pink-slime news sites battled over the hotly contested governor’s race between Democrat Amy Acton, who won, and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. According to Kali Bomeli, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, “more than sixty websites that look like Ohio local news outlets” are actually “run by partisan networks, according to our review of business records, domain registrations, and Meta ad data.” Bomeli defines pink slime as “partisan content disguised as local journalism.”
The rise of pink slime has been an overwhelmingly Republican phenomenon, although there have been a few examples of Democratic sites here and there. What’s taking place in Ohio suggests that Democrats are catching up.
What’s also clear is that AI and pink slime are rushing in to take advantage of the decline in quality local news. Even places that have established news organizations are vulnerable. If they’re digital-only, then they have to compete on the same playing field as everyone else, and on the web everything tends to look the same. And of course we’re long past the days when everyone in a community read the local print newspaper.
In fact, I’m starting to think that digital-only news outlets ought to consider adding print just so they can stand out from their increasingly dubious competitors. But that’s something not many can afford to do.
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