Your town has a news site. It has your town's name in the domain. It has a masthead, a "Local Government" tab, headlines about your county board and your school district. It looks like the paper your grandparents subscribed to, except it never asked anyone for a subscription. * Nobody in your town works there. Nobody in your town has ever worked there. The county-board story was assembled by software out of a public spreadsheet, and the site exists because a political operation decided your zip code was worth talking to. * That's pink slime journalism, and by one count there are now more sites like it in America than there are daily newspapers. * ### Where the name comes from * The phrase is borrowed from meat. "Pink slime" was the tabloid nickname for lean finely textured beef — the processed filler blended into ground beef without a label telling you it was there. It's technically food. It is not what you thought you were buying. * The journalism version was named in 2012 by **Ryan Smith**, a Chicago freelancer, in an episode of *This American Life* about his own employer, a company called **Journatic**. Journatic sold cheap "local" content to real newspapers — content produced far from the towns it described, some of it under **fake bylines** invented to sound American. The company later rebranded as Locality Labs. * So the term was never about lying, exactly. It was about **filler wearing the packaging of the real thing**. That's still the useful definition. * ### The actual definition * **A pink slime outlet is a site built to look like an independent local news organization while actually being produced at scale — algorithmically, remotely, or both — and funded by a political or commercial interest it does not disclose to the reader.** * Three parts, and all three have to be there: * **1. It performs localness.** Town name, county name, "Times" or "Reporter" or "Gazette" in the title. * **2. It isn't produced locally.** Stories are generated from public data sets or written by a distant content shop, in bulk, across hundreds of towns at once. * **3. The funder is hidden.** Not absent — hidden. A campaign-funded site that says on the front page "we are funded by this campaign" is a political ad. It might be tacky. It isn't pink slime. * ### How big it got * The most thorough tracking has come from the **Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia**, whose researcher **Priyanjana Bengani** spent years mapping one network in particular: **Metric Media**, run by Chicago businessman **Brian Timpone**. The Tow Center found the operation activated **more than 700 local sites in 2020 alone**, eventually reaching sites in 49 states, and that **over 90% of the stories** were either algorithmically generated from publicly available data sets or repurposed from legitimate outlets. * Then came the milestone. In **June 2024, NewsGuard** reported that it had identified **1,265 pink slime outlets** operating in the United States — against **1,213 daily newspapers** still publishing. The fake local press had, numerically, passed the real one. * That number deserves a caveat NewsGuard itself supplies: the networks it tracks run in **both directions politically**. Its list includes Metric Media and Local Government Information Services on the right, and Courier Newsroom, The American Independent and States Newsroom on the other side. This is not a story about one party. It's a story about a vacuum — towns that lost their newspaper and kept their appetite for local news — and about how cheap it now is to fill that vacuum with something that costs almost nothing to produce. * ### The part nobody tells you: almost nobody reads them * Here is where the panic needs a brake. * A Stanford study by **Ryan C. Moore, Ross Dahlke, Priyanjana Bengani and Jeffrey T. Hancock** — reported by Northwestern's Local News Initiative in **March 2023**, then still a pre-print — tracked what Americans actually consumed. The finding: only **3.7% of Americans** were exposed to a pink slime site at all. The single heaviest consumer in the entire dataset had read **ten articles**. Total. * For comparison, in the same data, **39.1%** were exposed to misinformation websites and **36.4%** to legitimate local news sites. * So the honest version of the story is not "millions are being brainwashed by fake local news." It's stranger and, if you think about it, sadder: **a thousand-plus newspapers' worth of infrastructure was built for an audience that mostly never showed up.** These sites are less a mass-persuasion machine than a set of props — useful for the screenshot, the shared link, the "even the local paper is reporting..." line in a campaign mailer. The site doesn't need readers. It needs to exist so it can be cited. * That's the mechanism worth understanding, because it means the damage isn't measured in traffic. It's measured in **the citation you'll see somewhere else** — in a candidate's ad, in a viral post, in a real reporter's search results. * ### How to check a local site in about ninety seconds * **Look for humans.** Real local outlets are desperate to show you their staff — a Staff page with names, photos, emails, a phone number with the local area code. Pink slime sites usually have a generic "About" page, no named editor, and a contact form. * **Read three bylines.** Are they the same two names across dozens of unrelated stories? Are they no names at all — "Staff Report," "By [Town] Times"? Search a byline. If a reporter allegedly covering your county has no other footprint anywhere, that's your answer. * **Check for the boring stuff.** Real local journalism is obituaries, high school sports scores, zoning variances, the fire district budget. It is relentlessly, gloriously dull. A "local" site with no obituaries and no school sports, but three stories this week on state-level tax policy, is not covering your town. It is using your town's name. * **Find the network.** Copy a sentence of the site's boilerplate or its "About" text and search it in quotes. If the identical paragraph appears on forty sites named after forty other towns, you've found the factory. * **Ask who pays.** Look for a funding or ownership disclosure. Nonprofit newsrooms name their donors. Family papers name the family. If nowhere on the site can you find out who owns it, treat everything on it as advertising until proven otherwise. * **Check the age.** A domain registered eight months ago covering a town with a 130-year-old paper is a claim, not a newsroom. * ### Why this matters more than the reader counts suggest * The reason pink slime works isn't that it's persuasive. It's that **local news is the most trusted tier of media there is**, and trust is transferable. People who don't believe a word from a national network will believe the paper that printed their kid's baseball score. That trust took a century to build, in each town, one obituary at a time. * What the pink slime networks figured out is that you can rent it. You don't have to earn a town's confidence if you can buy a domain with the town's name in it and stand where the newspaper used to be. * The defense isn't cynicism. Treating everything local as fake is exactly the outcome that suits an operation with no staff, no address and no accountability, because it puts the shell and the real newsroom on equal footing. * The defense is the ninety-second check. Names, obituaries, network boilerplate, funders. A real local paper passes it in seconds. A shell can't pass it at all.