Few of us would be thrilled to read a story reporting that the median age of someone living in Bartow County, Georgia is 38–a year younger than the 39-year-old average for the United States.
Why is it then the top headline on the local news website NW Atlanta News, along with a minor change proposed to Georgia’s incest laws and three separate stories on the cheapest gas in Pickens, Cherokee and Bartow Counties? There’s no one to ask. The site has no bylines, no staff page listing reporters or editors, and lacks an office in northwest Atlanta. There’s not even a phone number to call.
That’s par for the course for Metric Media network, the publisher of metro Atlanta news sites like NW Atlanta News, SE Atlanta News, and the ATL Standard. Quietly, Metric Media has become the self-proclaimed largest local news producer in the United States since its founding in 2019, with more than 1,300 news sites scattered all over the country, including 22 in Georgia.
Metric Media claims to produce “over 5 million news articles every month” with a stated mission to “restore community-based journalism,” but there’s almost no transparency; the company’s news production is hidden in a black box.
What is pink-slime journalism?
Pink-slime journalism is a phrase I coined back in 2012 that refers to the gooey filler added to processed meats in grocery stores without a warning label. What were you really eating? On an episode of NPR’s This American Life, I blew the whistle on Journatic, a predecessor to Metric Media. This company tried to disrupt the newspaper industry by outsourcing the work of local journalism to a virtual sweatshop in the Philippines with workers earning pennies per story.
After the controversy died down, Journatic didn’t go away. They rebranded multiple times — to Local Labs, Locality Labs, and now Metric Media — while moving to a new business model. There was little money in the dying newspaper industry, so Journatic’s CEO, Brian Timpone, pivoted towards pay-for-play partisan political news.
He and Dan Proft, an Illinois-based conservative talk show host, have quietly built a national network of hundreds of pink-slime websites, each distributing algorithmically generated articles, a small number of reported stories, and pro-Republican political news stories and editorials.
Their websites borrow the aesthetics of established media brands, but that’s window dressing for the site’s poorly made product. Many of the stories consist of data scraped from other sources and repackaged as news without additional context, such as the median age and gas price stories or a list of sex offenders living in your county.
These sites also copy and paste word-for-word press releases about the goings-on at local schools, businesses, and city governments. Most of their editorial resources are devoted to biased political coverage or op-eds from GOP politicians and pundits.
Spamming the news feeds
Frequently, these stories fade into obscurity. Nearly all (92%) of the pink-slime sites have no Alexa Traffic Rank, which means no detectable visitors. But just as spam emails rely on flooding inboxes in the hopes of exploiting a minuscule number of people, sometimes pink-slime stories break through to the mainstream.
In 2022, an article from a Chicago pink-slime site went viral in right-wing social media circles, because it falsely claimed that suburban school administrators were implementing race-based grading. The blowback forced local school officials to release a statement debunking the report. Even so, days after the story was proved false, outlets such as One America News were still reporting it as fact.
News sites like Georgia Star News muddy the waters between traditional local news and pink slime even further. They’re part of the Star News Network, a network of partisan, pro-Trump sites across 14 states with bylined news stories, but very little transparency.
After the 2020 presidential election, where Georgia elected Biden over Trump by a narrow margin, the Georgia Star published a misleading story that questioned the legitimacy of nearly 20,000 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes statewide. But county elections officials said all the ballots were accounted for—and noted that Georgia’s votes for president were counted three times following the 2020 election.
Amid the controversy, Trump himself linked to a One America News segment about the deceptive story and praised the Georgia Star writer for “the incredible reporting you have done.”
Conservative political interests make up the bulk of pink-slime and partisan news sites, but not all. Courier Newsroom hosts 11 pro-Democratic Party online news sites in key swing states, like Michigan’s The ‘Gander and Arizona’s The Copper Courier. The public benefit corporation, which bills itself as a “pro-democracy network,” was founded by Tara McGowan, a former operative for a super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. In a November editorial for Courier Newsroom, McGowan decried news outlets that seek to publish objective, “both sides” journalism as “dangerous.”
Where the money comes from to fund these partisan news sites is also opaque. Much of it is from super PACs and other dark money sources. For example, during the 2022 midterm election cycle, Metric Media Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, received $1.6 million from three conservative PACs, according to research from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.
In 2020, DonorsTrust, a libertarian nonprofit, gave Metric Media Foundation $1.27 million “for general operations,” according to the Tow Center. A 2019 analysis of their IRS filings by the Center for Media and Democracy found that DonorsTrust and a sister organization, Donors Capital Fund, had pumped at least $90 million into “right-wing causes.”
What does this mean for the 2024 elections?
We will see. The general election is still nine months away, so funding will likely ramp up for Metric Media and other pink-slime journalism organizations as November approaches.
For more information
Last week, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism released an extensive 175-page report on the pink-slime, politically partisan journalism industry from researcher Priyanjana Bengani. It summarizes the Tow Center’s investigations into the rapid expansion and increased funding for Metric Media since its founding in 2019, along with case studies exploring the production of partisan local news during the 2022 midterm elections.
Interested in finding out what pink-slime journalism sites are in your backyard? Iffy News, made by journalist Barrett Golding, hosts a helpful index and map of U.S. pink-slime sites. You can find the 37 pink-slime sites he’s mapped in Georgia and hundreds more nationally.
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