Political connections of local news owners spur suspicion, distrust • New Jersey Monitor

As a longtime government gadfly, Jacqueline Hone has become a devout consumer of her elected officials’ social media pages, tired of feeling unheard or getting cut off whenever she’d pipe up at her local municipal meetings in Ridgewood.

“Facebook is really the only platform we have to speak without being censored,” she said.

But last year, critical comments she and other Ridgewood residents posted on Mayor Paul Vagianos’ Facebook page vanished, and soon after, she was blocked from seeing some posts. A public records request showed a surprising possible culprit — her local news publisher.

Jason DeAlessi runs the hyperlocal news site TapInto-Ridgewood. He also runs a digital production firm that says it specializes in “political campaigns and more,” and has promoted plenty of politicians in New Jersey, including Vagianos. The records the village sent Hone showed that DeAlessi, who franchised TapInto Ridgewood in March 2021, was authorized to manage Vagianos’ Facebook page in 2022 and 2023.

“We were being censored left and right,” she said. “The media was controlling his social media platform and the message. They’re the campaign strategist for the mayor. There should be accountability of some sort.”

The Facebook flap seems emblematic of the eroded trust a growing portion of the population has in news media. As the journalism industry shrinks and mainstream media outlets disappear, some of the websites that have filled the gap are run by politically connected editors and publishers and others with potentially hidden motives — leaving readers to be unwittingly manipulated, experts say.

“We call them ‘pink slime sites’ — you know, the meat stuff that looks like sausage but isn’t sausage. It looks like news, but it isn’t really news,” said Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. “There are dozens slash hundreds of sites popping up, particularly this year, which have exactly that model. You see these kinds of openly political operations moving into news space, and then also saying, ‘Well, we are your independent source of news.’”

The Tow Center says pink slime journalism is content that mimics the appearance of local news but instead is primarily “partisan content or reputation laundering that lacks transparency around intent, authorship, ownership, and funding.”

Bell spoke generally about news sites with politically connected or motivated publishers and owners, not specifically about TapInto sites.

Examples abound of New Jersey news sites whose owners have political connections they fail to divulge or even secretly exploit, as conservative Shore News Network founder Phil Stilton has been accused of doing. Those political connections can shape their coverage of the community, with readers often wholly unaware of the deals and dynamics behind every headline, critics say.

The trend has dire implications for democracy, Bell said. When independent local journalism disappears, misinformation spreads, political polarization worsens, voter participation declines, graft goes unchecked, and taxes rise, according to a 2023 report by Northwestern University’s Medill School.

“Corruption goes up, public tax dollars are wasted or misspent, public officials spend longer in office, even things like toxicity in water and air increases in places where there is no local news, because there isn’t somebody going around knocking on the doors of local businesses and local government going, ‘Hey, what about that waste that you dumped in the river last week?’” Bell said.

Independent journalism serves as protection, and people don’t even need to read local news to benefit from the watchdog role it serves in a community, she added.

“Without it, you start to really worry about the foundations of how sound is our local governance in your local community, or even in the country at large,” she said.

‘Like we’re living in Russia’

New Jersey still has plenty of news outlets.

In a 2021 study, the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University found 683 based here, from newspapers, websites, and radio and TV stations to outlets that target particular readers, including weather watchers, Spanish speakers, and technology geeks.

But researchers found plenty of news deserts, too, with no one keeping an eye on public officials or chronicling community happenings.

That’s what DeAlessi says drove him to franchise TapInto’s Ridgewood and Roselle Park sites. He joined the Kinnelon school board in 2017 and quickly grew frustrated that no reporters covered their meetings.

“Oftentimes, the TapInto reporters are the only ones who actually show up to the town council, the planning board, the zoning board, the board of education,” he said. “That helps fortify local news and be that bit of transparency and let the air in to these meetings that are almost closed-door, in the sense that you have to show up, otherwise you don’t really know what happens.”

But Hone and Anne Loving, another regular at Ridgewood meetings, say TapInto’s coverage doesn’t give them a full picture of what happens either.

They suspect that’s because DeAlessi represented Vagianos, the Ridgewood mayor, in his 2017 and 2021 campaigns. They learned through public record requests that DeAlessi was one of three managers of Vagianos’ Facebook page in 2022 and 2023. DeAlessi said he no longer manages the page.

In Roselle Park, where DeAlessi also owns the TapInto site, he served as campaign manager for Mayor Joe Signorello’s 2023 congressional bid.

Loving found DeAlessi’s political connections alarming.

“It’s like we’re living in Russia, you know, where there’s one newspaper that only prints whatever Putin says they’re allowed to print,” Loving said.

The outlet offered disclosures at the bottom of election-related stories last fall, DeAlessi said. But that’s not enough, Hone said.

“TapInto can be whatever they decide they want to be, with whatever intent they have, but there should be full disclosure at the end of every single article, at the beginning of it, and all the way around,” she said. “Otherwise, that’s not news. That is straight propaganda, and it’s being painted as news.”

Politically connected publishers

Politically connected publishers and news-shapers are not unique to Ridgewood and Roselle Park.

Stilton, founder and editor of the Shore News Network, was a spokesman for Toms River’s municipal government and police department, and Jackson Township hired him in the spring to handle their marketing and media relations for the rest of the year.

In Trenton, City Council President Crystal Feliciano sometimes reports for Peterson’s Breaking News of Trenton, a site with 62,000 followers.

State Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth) founded the Monmouth County-based Community Magazine in 2010. PhillyVoice, which also covers South Jersey, was founded in 2014 by Lexie Norcross, whose father is George Norcross, the recently indicted Democratic power broker in South Jersey and one-time co-owner of Philadelphia’s two largest daily newspapers, the Inquirer and Daily News. David Wildstein, a former Livingston mayor and political appointee of former Gov. Chris Christie, founded and runs New Jersey Globe, a political site that got some attention during former Sen. Bob Menendez’s recent corruption trial.

TapInto franchises its sites to people from all sorts of backgrounds, including an LGBTQ activist (Lauren Albrecht, who co-owns the Neptune site), a comedian (Joey Novick, who co-owns the Flemington-Raritan site), and others who have worked as teachers, writers, public relations professionals, real estate agents, and more.

The chain also includes politically connected publishers and editors:

• Steve Lenox, publisher of TapInto sites in Bayonne, Hamilton/Robbinsville, Hoboken, Jersey City, and Paterson, runs a consulting firm that does legislative advocacy and has served as state director for former Sen. Frank Lautenberg, chief of staff for Sen. Linda Greenstein when she was in the Assembly, spokesman for Jersey City’s police union, and legislative affairs coordinator for the New Jersey State AFL-CIO. Lenox accompanied Gov. Phil Murphy on a 2022 trade mission to Ireland and subsequently snagged the top job at the New Jersey Ireland Center, which is part of Choose New Jersey, a nonprofit created to lure businesses to the state.
• Darlene Cullen, publisher of the South Plainfield site, served on the borough’s council and its planning, zoning, library, and housing and community development boards. Her husband, Glenn, is borough administrator.
• Elizabeth Meyers, who co-owns the Bordentown and Mount Laurel sites, worked for several state legislators and was Assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo’s chief of staff.
• Matt Doherty, who owns the Belmar/Lake Como site, was a Belmar councilman and mayor who previously helmed the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority and the Atlantic City Housing Authority.
• Bloomfield Fire Chief Louis Venezia and Deputy Chief Joe Coletta co-own the Bloomfield TapInto. Venezia’s brother Michael became a state assemblyman this year after a decade as Bloomfield’s mayor.
• Kathy Cryan, who has owned the Union site since 2015, is married to Sen. Joe Cryan (D-Union).
• Bruno Tedeschi, co-publisher of the Newark and Camden sites, chairs the Westfield Democrats.

A few have revealed their political ties in profiles of their publishers and editors, and some tack disclosure statements at the end of some stories. None, though, note their connections in every story, few reveal them in their bios, and some sites lack any disclosures altogether.

Disclosure key

TapInto founder Michael Shapiro said the chain has checks in place to ensure TapInto sites don’t become political mouthpieces. He and a committee comprising successful franchisees interview franchise applicants to confirm they have sound plans, show a capability for content and sales, and have no political agenda, he said. They reject more than half of applicants, he added.

“If they have any form of a political agenda, they do not get approved to franchise — in fact, that’s the No. 1 reason why people get rejected to franchise,” he said.

Franchise agreements require objectivity, and franchisees must follow Society of Professional Journalists standards, he said. He has terminated several agreements when franchisees’ political agendas came to light, he added.

“Our reputation and credibility is everything,” he said. “We are always thinking: How can we continue to improve? Because at the end of the day, the future of democracy depends on it. Like that’s how important this is. And so, excuse the language but, like, we don’t F around with this stuff. We take it really seriously.”

The chain’s roots reach back to 2008 when he launched The Alternative Press in New Providence. A former lawyer, Shapiro wanted an online, daily news outlet in his town and more time at home with his wife and son. He began franchising his media model about 10 years ago, and now 98 TapInto sites cover more than 125 municipalities in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

Objectivity is key, he stressed.

“We even don’t have an editorial page, because if you have an editorial page, that creates the danger that that editorial mindset could seep into your news reporting,” he said.

Doherty, the former Belmar mayor, said news coverage isn’t automatically tainted because of a publisher’s political connections, in the same way a publisher without political connections isn’t automatically objective.

“In my case, it’s so well known that I’m the former mayor and I am a Democrat. I don’t hide that. I don’t pretend like that’s not a part of who I am. But look, I’m a Mets fan. That doesn’t mean I’m going to write something bad about the Phillies,” he said.

He pointed to hard-hitting stories he’s done that expose things public officials likely would prefer to stay hidden, like the November tussle between Bradley Beach’s police chief and a sergeant. Doherty broke the story, which led to an investigation and the chief’s retirement.

“The lens that I always look at it through is: Is this news newsworthy?” Doherty said. “I don’t care whether it’s Democrat or Republican.”

He said he includes disclosures on stories even when they’re not hard-hitting news, like a report on a charity run for a nonprofit he helms.

Other politically connected publishers and community journalists say their sites aren’t meant to be investigative watchdogs, or even news purveyors.

Gopal said his magazine focuses on “fun community features” like pet celebrities and is open about highlighting advertisers and their products.

“We are not a news publication,” he said.

In Trenton, Thomas Peterson was a teenager when he started Peterson’s Breaking News of Trenton over a decade ago to showcase the photos and news he gathered by bicycling to breaking news scenes. Feliciano was one of his teachers, and she soon became a regular fixture on the site. Since her 2022 election to city council, she has served as an occasional “community correspondent” who highlights events in and around the city.

“Considering the fact that media is slim, it’s great that people want to step up and report or showcase area happenings from their perspective,” Feliciano said.

Whether or not a local news outlet has politically connected owners and contributors, transparency is key, said Stefanie Murray, director of Montclair’s Center for Cooperative Media.

“New Jersey residents should be able to easily ascertain who owns the news organization they are relying on,” Murray said. “It builds trust, and for an industry that promotes and advocates for transparency from other industries, it’s the least we should expect of ourselves.”

Why does it matter?

Rick Edmonds is a media business analyst for the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school and research group.

He doesn’t think there’s anything wrong or unethical about a site with a viewpoint or a cause, especially if readers can figure that out just by looking at it.

And news outlets don’t necessarily have to do major investigations or exposés to serve the important role of building a reliable public record of a town’s happenings, added Bell of the Tow Center.

But sites that seem like legitimate local news sources but are instead covert vehicles for their owners’ agendas have proliferated, Bell and Edmonds agreed.

“With so much less coverage by newspapers and Associated Press and so forth, people who really, really want that content will seek it elsewhere. That lays the groundwork for these folks who want to come in and do it from a fairly partisan angle,” Edmonds said. “You’ll find publications that are, you could call them, ‘pay to play.’”

In Ridgewood, Loving says TapInto’s coverage, when compared to other local outlets that cover Ridgewood, often angers her. After state environmental officials alerted village leaders to illegal dumping and potential soil contamination at a historic site, TapInto posted uncritical updates while other press centered the controversy. TapInto also focused on the positive in its coverage of the regional water authority, despite a lawsuit filed by a citizen who alleged contamination so bad it caused his cancer.

“What they do in my little town affects me drastically — my pocketbook, my quality of life. I used to be addicted to the local news, but we have no good source of local news anymore,” Loving said.

An exploitation of public trust?

DeAlessi rejects the idea that his political connections make him unfit for journalism.

“People who formerly were elected officials or worked in government, they’re usually the ones who have the most background knowledge on local government and local business and the community connections,” DeAlessi said.

He’s also grown weary of the criticism. Neither he nor his firm Fuerza Strategy Group has done business with Ridgewood. He added that Fuerza “is not working on any campaign in Ridgewood” and does not have a “current financial relationship” with any elected official in Ridgewood.

“We used to do his campaign-side social media, which is something very different and unique and it’s privately funded. We’ve never been publicly funded by either town that we work in,” he said. “We don’t work for the actual village of Ridgewood, we’re not their spokesperson, we never claimed to be.”

But state campaign finance and other records show DeAlessi did work for Vagianos’ 2021 village council campaign and was his campaign manager in his 2017 bid for state Assembly. Fuerza’s website featured Vagianos as a “case study” of its work as recently as Sept. 7, although no reference to Vagianos appears there as of the time of publication.

Vagianos filed his most recent campaign finance report for his current reelection campaign in May 2023. It lists DeAlessi’s phone number and mailing address at a UPS store that DeAlessi has used.

Such a tangled business relationship explains why some stories on DeAlessi’s site “read like a press release,” Hone said.

“How can the public expect accurate and impartial news when it is funded by the very elected representative it covers?” she said. “Controlling both the public narrative and the mayor’s campaign exemplifies the exploitation of public trust. This conflict of interest is unacceptable, undermines the will of the people, and threatens the integrity of our elections and elected officials.”