The Daily - A Partisan Future for Local News?

Episode Date: October 28, 2020

Local news in America has long been widely trusted, and widely seen as objective. But as traditional local papers struggle, there have been attempts across the political spectrum to create more partisan outlets.Few can have been as ambitious or widespread as the nationwide network of 1,300 websites and newspapers run by Brian Timpone, a television reporter turned internet entrepreneur.He has said that he sees local news as a means of preserving American civil discourse. But a Times investigation has found that Republican operatives and public relations firms have been paying for articles in his outlets and intimately dictating the editorial direction of stories.Today, we speak to the Times journalists behind the investigation.Guests: Davey Alba, a technology reporter for The New York Times covering online misinformation and its global harms; and Jack Nicas, who covers technology for The Times from San Francisco. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Here’s the full investigation into a nationwide operation of 1,300 local sites that publishes coverage ordered up by Republican groups and corporate P.R. firms.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily. Today. A Times investigation finds that as the local news industry collapses, a secretive network of pay-to-play news sites is seeking to take its place. news sites is seeking to take its place. My colleagues, Davey Alba and Jack Nickus, on the company trying to rewrite the rules of American journalism. It's Wednesday, October 28th. lady from Sweden and an eye doctor and a priest from Ireland. And I would interview them and get their life stories and would put out my little newspaper. And then, you know, when I came of age, it was the Vietnam War. And I got into it, frankly, because I think, you know, truth is important.

And I also, at that time, very naively, you know, I believed that people were uninformed. And once they knew the truth, then they'd act differently. So, Devi and Jack, tell me about Pat Morris. So, Pat Morris is a 69-year-old freelance writer. She is now based in Newport Ritchie in Florida. Her entire career has been in journalism. So, I wound up writing for papers like the East Village Other, New York Ace, The Herald, those types of papers.

I moved to Cincinnati and worked for an alternative paper called Everybody's News. She worked for a variety of alternative newspapers and also various local newspapers around the country. I was an editor for a Jewish newspaper called the American Israelite, which is, I consider it a community paper, even though it's not a geographic community. Bouncing around different publications, including in North Carolina and even the Virgin Islands. And I was really having a ball just writing what I wanted. And then did end up as a copy editor at the Florham Park Eagle in New Jersey and sort of thought that she would have a steady job there. I kind of took that job just in time for the financial collapse around 2008. I think the industry probably was collapsing 2007, 2008, and then the whole economy tanked.

There were a lot of cutbacks and a lot of people who were laid off, and Pat Morris was one of them. So what does she end up doing after that? So after she gets laid off, she does a bunch of freelance jobs, and then in 2018 starts at a little-known company called Franklin Archer, which she eventually starts to think of as a content mill. And Jack, what exactly is a content mill? A content mill is a phenomenon in the internet age of journalism. Essentially, these are sites that churn out basic stories to generate clicks and sell ads. And it's everything from the sort

of clickbait we see beneath a lot of news articles like, you'll never believe what these child celebrities look like now. I totally click on those, yes. To more basic articles for maybe trade publications, etc. And these sorts of jobs are what a lot of journalists had to get into after the economic recession in 2008 because so many traditional journalism jobs, particularly at local newspapers, were disappearing. So Pat came across this job at Franklin Archer that just seemed like writing local news stories across the U.S. from, you know, where she lived in Florida.

And so I applied and I got a job as copy editor. They said I'd be copy editing stuff from a variety of their clients. I thought that the clients were actual established entities that had contracted with Franklin Archer for content, which is what everybody does now, you know, because you don't have staff and you don't have reporters and you don't have journalism. You have content. So Pat understands that she has become a local news reporter

for a company called Franklin Archer that sells her articles to a variety of different local newspapers across the country. Right. So maybe not the best thing for a local newspaper, especially if you're a reporter there, but pretty good for Pat Morris. Yeah, absolutely. You got paid on time, all the time. It was direct deposit. It was weekly, and then it became every other week. I never, I gotta say, I never had an issue. You know, it was just a big draw when you're a freelancer, you know, that you knew like every week you were going to have,

even if it was just $100, you know, you knew you were going to have that, I think is very attractive to people. And what kinds of stories does that mean Pat ends up working on? Well, she works on a lot of just community-based stories. It wasn't hard news. It was all soft, featurey stuff. You know, the police department having human trafficking awareness programs. The fire department doing whatever the fire department did. Recycling, this company that recycles plastic bags into tables. You know, that kind of thing.

Right, they were kind of meat and potatoes of local news. Absolutely, yeah. But from the beginning, there were also signs that something was a little bit off about this job. They said a lot of the clients are conservative. Is that a problem for you? I remember specifically, I asked, well, what do you mean by conservative? You know, are you talking about white supremacist stuff? Are you talking about? And it was like, oh, no, no, no, nothing like that. You know, but a lot of the again, it's the clients are, you know, kind of pro-business. And I'm like, well, OK, I can if it's pro-business, I of them that are focused on local politicians, Republicans specifically. And she is really uncomfortable with the way it seems very one-sided to her.

So she actually starts to turn down these assignments and try to do these very simple local pieces on the fire department and, you know, the community board meeting and things like that. But these sites turn out so much political content that it becomes hard to avoid for her. And at one point, she gets a rather interesting assignment. So Pat's assignment is copy editing this story about a class at the University of Illinois. It was this absolutely alarmist story about how a literature class was looking at a book that had sexual content. And it was, oh, you know, sexual content in a college-level literature course. And in an earlier draft of this story,

there's a student that's so outraged by this that they drop the course. So I thought that was pretty bizarre. And then as I read on, supposedly this student, unnamed student, was so traumatized by the whole thing that they either quit the class or they quit school. And, you know, I'm reading it and I'm going, this is really weird.

And Pat asks a very reasonable fact-checking question. So I went back to the reporter because I, you know, and said, well, can you identify these people? You know. How do you know that the student quit? Can you attribute this to a source? This mysterious student, you know, I heard about this student who quit. Well, who was it? You know, did they really quit? And the writer basically says, I can't attribute that fact in the story because this came directly from Brian. And I didn't know who Brian was.

I think I said that. Well, who's Brian? And I got back this thing from somebody else. Like, Brian is the company, what he wants, we want. And it's, okay. So who is Brian? Brian, she learns, is the top dog in this organization that she has a job at. And in an email, she

actually hears from her assigning editor saying whatever Brian wants goes. And it didn't even seem odd to me because I had worked in another place where the line between editorial and business was very, very blurred. Mm-hmm. And did you ever find out more about who Brian was? Well, I was told, you know, Brian. Then I got emails from Brian Chimpone, so I knew his name, which is pretty much all I knew until I was contacted by the Times. So you got a call from us.

Yeah. And why were you calling Pat? Well, we were reaching out to Pat because Davey and I were trying to talk to anyone who had ever worked for this guy, Brian Timpone. And that's because it turns out that Brian has got a lot more going on than Pat had realized. Brian is the man behind perhaps the biggest news operation you've never heard of. Thank you for joining us for another edition of Against the Current.

My guest on this edition is Brian Timpone. And Brian got his start in news as a reporter for TV stations in Illinois. Brian, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Dan. But eventually he decided he didn't want to just report the news. He wanted to be a newspaper publisher. Media as it's perceived is content. And so he bought some community newspapers in Illinois and he started to see

pretty early on the signs of collapse in the journalism industry, and particularly in local news. The problem with old traditional media today is that a lot of them produce as if we were in the previous era. They produce the same types of content that worked in that previous era. And because of inertia, it stays. So he decided that he was going to capitalize on that. And he started a company called Jurnatic. And this company essentially is designed to outsource the local news reporting for many of the big city papers around the country. So what's your system? Your system is, I mean, essentially you're arguing that major urban dailies should outsource their news production to you. I don't think they should all outsource their news production. But isn't that what you do?

Community news, because they can't do it themselves. Okay. But describe that. I mean, how can you and your group of writers... Do it for a 20th of the cost? Yeah. How? To do that, he develops some rudimentary software that turns public records into little snippets of news. And then he also hires a team of reporters to cover communities remotely. And to Brian, the idea here is local news is dying

and the old business model is not sustainable in the age of the internet. And this is a lower cost model to still provide local news to small towns and cities across the nation. And to do that, Brian is selling this local news content to legacy news organizations like the Chicago Tribune and the Houston Chronicle, who themselves are trying to cut their costs. And so how does it go? So it's going pretty well for Brian Timponi at this point. So much so that the Chicago Tribune actually fires its staff that covers the Chicago suburbs and uses Brian Timponi's operation to cover the suburbs. But then... You have that thought, what other jobs can we possibly

outsource to people far away at this point? Well, Sarah Canning tells this story of a fairly recent addition to the list of jobs. Back in November... The radio program This American Life comes in and does a show that reveals that in a lot of cases... The reporter's name on the story is Ginny Cox, but there is no Ginny Cox. Or even if there is a Ginny Cox somewhere out there, she didn't write this story. These stories are being written by people in the Philippines, and they get paid much less than an American writer

would get paid to do these stories. And in a lot of these cases, they are also publishing under fake bylines. Jeez. Some other fake names that have made their way onto the news sites of Duranix clients in the real estate sections, Carrie Reed, Amy Anderson, Jay Brownstown, Christine Scott, Betty Verde, Sam Anderson, Carla Anderson. So the clients of Brian are really outraged and say, you know, this is not what we're paying for. This is not what we signed up for. So they basically pull out of the deals with Brian and the whole operation kind of crashes and burns. So now Brian Timpone is facing failure, but from the ashes of Jurnatic, he comes up with this new idea.

And this new idea is bigger and it's bolder and it involves an entirely new business model. And it all starts now with a web of companies that includes Franklin Archer. And how exactly is it different from Drenetic? What's different this time around? It's different in a couple of key ways. A, the writers in this network are now American freelancers, no longer the Filipino workers abroad. And B, the news articles that they're producing are for websites that look like local news,

but are actually primarily controlled by Brian Tamponi himself and appear to be based around the U.S. Huh. And so what are they like? Well, I think I should just show you. It's probably easiest. Okay.

So let's go to a website called Thumb Reporter, thumbreporter.com. Okay, let me type that in. And Thumb is actually a region of Michigan. The lower peninsula of Michigan is kind of shaped like a mitten. And the Thumb of Michigan is just north of Detroit, east of the Tri-Cities in Michigan. Okay.

So you're there, ThumbReporter.com? Yeah, I'm on ThumbReporter.com. My first observation is that it looks like a regular local news website. A lot of news stories, a lot of political news stories. Yeah, and it's a pretty clean, simple layout. It doesn't look real clickbaity or anything. It's a pretty basic layout with some photos of politicians, and there's a good amount of content as you scroll down.

Yeah, there's about 12 articles on this first screen. Right. I mean, I guess at the outset, let's just take stock of some of these headlines. The top headline is about this local Republican lawmaker who's praising a court order that struck down the Democratic governor's COVID policies. Then there's another headline about a different Republican lawmaker complaining that Michigan should fully reopen the economy. There's another headline about one of the same Republican lawmakers passing four bills, another headline about a Republican lawmaker who's going to help local farmers,

and then another headline about a Republican lawmaker who's talking about voter fraud. And... I think I'm seeing a clear trend here. Lots of coverage of Republicans, lots of positive coverage of Republicans. Yes. And there is, though, one story about a Democrat,

and the headline is, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer gets F-grade for fiscal management. And it's a report about this study from the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. And this is a trend that Pat saw in her assignments for Franklin Archer. And it's a trend that we're seeing across the board on websites run by Ryan Timpone. And this is just one example of a website in the network. What we found is that there are almost 1,300 websites like this, and they're in all 50 states. And do all these websites take this approach of positively covering Republicans in general, and negatively covering Democrats?

Pretty much, yeah. But there are some innocuous articles on these websites, too. And these just are straight news articles about the local community. But they seem to be in service of adding legitimacy and to make the sites look more neutral than they really are. We'll be right back. So what exactly is going on here? I mean, how should we be thinking about what this latest Brian Timpone news operation is? Because as I said earlier, this does not seem like what someone like Pat Morris thought they were signing up for. What exactly is this? So Davey and I set out to answer that very question.

So, Davey and I set out to answer that very question. And after many months of reporting, we found out that this is not a traditional journalism outfit. In fact, it is a pay-for-play operation. of a money trail where a good chunk of the funding for these sites, traceable in public records, are payments from political groups and campaigns. Wow. That is very untraditional journalism, if it can even be called journalism. It certainly is. And it helps explain why you see some of the slant that we just saw on that news website. And essentially, you know, some of what we found through thousands of internal emails and also the editing history behind dozens of stories was an operation in which some of these groups, political groups or PR professionals, actually pitch or order the stories to Tim Pony's network. And they file what is called a lead in which they give instructions on what the story should be about, who the reporter should talk to, what questions they should ask. And then after the story is published, we even found some instances in emails in which these so-called story watchers, as these clients are called, are able to even dictate edits after publication if they wanted the story to be more pointed or focus on something more. And so, as you noted, this is almost the

antithesis of the journalism ethics that most news organizations would abide by. Right. It's actually essentially a propaganda network. Hmm. So just so I have this straight, Republican candidates, conservative donors, are paying money to Brian Timponi's company. And as part of that transaction, they can ask for coverage, they can monitor coverage, they can get involved in shaping it, who is talked to for that coverage. That's what's going on here.

In some cases, that's exactly what we found. And is any of this disclosed to the reader? Virtually none of these sites have those kinds of disclosures. In fact, the sites go out of their way to state that they are objective and fair and unbiased in their coverage. And then at the same time that these descriptions are on the sites, we have seen internal emails where assigning editors are telling their freelance writers not to focus any article on a Democratic lawmaker or bill because their clients are Republicans. Wow. I wonder, Tack, if you can give me an example of how this pay-to-play system works.

Kind of break down an example for me. Sure. So one of the most compelling examples we found was around an article on a website called Maine Business Daily. And this article is about one of the most hotly contested and nationally important Senate races in November. It's between Republican Senator Susan Collins

and her Democratic challenger, Sarah Gideon. So what we found is the reporter who wrote this story did so according to clear instructions from a Republican operative who has worked for the Senate Leadership Fund, a PAC that has spent nearly $10 million attacking Sarah Gideon in this cycle. And that operative gave clear instructions to the reporter to write that Sarah Gideon was a hypocrite. And we even found in internal emails that the operative requested edits to the story after it was first published. And the resulting story was based solely on accusations

from the Senator Collins campaign and never included comment from Sarah Gideon. It sounds like this Republican operative got exactly the story he wanted, slamming the Democratic candidate for United States Senate for being two-faced. Indeed. And he not only got this story, but we also found his fingerprints on a number of stories about this Senate race in Maine and also the Senate race in South Carolina with Lindsey Graham and in Missouri with Roy Blunt. And what about the story that you told me about earlier, the one Pat was copyediting about the literature class at the University of Illinois? That article is not a clear-cut pay-to-play situation

as far as we can tell, but we do know a few things. What we found in emails is that Jeannie Ives, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Illinois, actually corresponded with Brian Timponi to get the story written. Wow. We also know from public documents that Jeannie Ives has paid Timponi's company's $55,000

according to state and federal records over the past three years. I do want to note that I did reach Jeannie Ives and she told me that those payments to Brian were for website design and Facebook ads and that she doesn't pay to plant stories. And Jack, were you able to understand why Jeannie Ives, local Republican political candidate, cared about a literature class at the University of Illinois?

In this particular case, we don't. We're unsure whether this is a personal or ideological issue for her, but it's almost beside the point because what's important for us here is to understand how probably because of her payments to Brian Timpone, she is able to get her pet issues published on his sites. And Michael, these are just two examples that we've spoken about, but this is what the network does. They put out stories like this. and over 17 days in July, we saw around 200 stories that were ordered up by these Republican operatives and corporate PR firms. That's pretty staggering. This is clearly very dubious as a journalistic practice.

I mean, very dubious. Is any of it illegal? It's unclear whether any of this is actually breaking the law. What you can say about it is that it violates our, you know, deeply held sense of what is ethical in journalism. And it eschews these traditional hallmarks of journalism of fairness and transparency. Legally speaking, the Federal Trade Commission requires that articles that are funded be clearly labeled as ads. And so it is possible in many of these cases where you have articles that are paid for and ordered up. under federal rules, these should include

disclosures. And in almost every case we found, there was no such labels. How does Brian Timpone explain what he's doing here, both ethically from a journalistic standpoint and legally? Well, Brian would not talk to us. We tried calling him, texting him, leaving him voicemails, emailing him. I even left a note at his home, but we didn't get any response. But what he has said in past interviews and in public appearances is that he believes this represents a local news business model that is more sustainable than the traditional model, which is clearly struggling. And I just want to jump in here and say something that might seem obvious, but journalism is really expensive. About 2,100 newspapers have

folded across the country since 2004, which is a 25% decline. Almost all local newspapers. Right. And what's also really interesting here is that Brian said in an interview in September with the Deseret News, which is a Utah news outlet, that he has a reason for trying to save local news, and it's not ideological. It's actually because he believes this is a way to save the country. And let me read you his quote in full. He said, quote, We believe the disappearance of community news has contributed to a marked decline in civility in America. When Americans know about their neighbors' wedding anniversaries, their work promotions,

and their children making the honor roll at school or earning junior high basketball accolades. They are less likely to caricature and typecast each other over political issues. And what he's basically saying is that local news helps you know your neighbors, and with that, you're less likely to hate each other. hate each other. It's fascinating to me that he sees this approach as a force for civility, because what seems so problematic about it, beyond the lack of transparency and the ethical challenges, is that this model injects partisanship into local news. And we have that already in our national news in abundance. Think of Fox News on the conservative side. Think of MSNBC on the liberal side. And we kind of know where that leads. It leads to a profound polarization in our national discourse. And yet the local news has remained, for the most part,

a bastion of objective news telling, right? This kind of sacred, untouched corner of the news industry. And stories coming out of a local school board, of a local police department, or your kid's soccer game, those are told as kind of straight news. But if Brian Timponi succeeds in making this the future of local news, then that version of local journalism goes away. Right. And in our reporting, we saw that there are similar efforts on both the right and the left to create similar partisan local news outlets. And I'll note that these are not as ambitious, and they don't have the scale of Brian's operation. But nevertheless, we have long heard about the death of local news. And often we have heard about that

in the context of predictions that no one will be watching at City Hall and there will be corruption and a lack of accountability. But instead of a pure death of local news, I think what we've seen here is a rushing in of partisan interests and national money. And that has led to this more partisan version of local news, which could make civility impossible in cities and towns across the country. And Michael, it's worth adding that the reason anyone knows about this story at all is because of a report in a local newspaper called the Lansing State Journal in Michigan. They were the ones that first raised questions about these sites. And then that led to several other in-depth stories like in the Columbia Journalism Review, and it also led to

our investigation. And there's something that feels very apt about that. The fact that it was good local journalism that uncovered this kind of twisted version of local journalism here. That's the work that's at stake. Because, you know, Brian Timponi has said in a recent interview that he plans to create 15,000 more websites like this. This is only going to get bigger.

Davy and Jack, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you for having us. Thank you. You know, I started Googling, and it was just like a medicine ball in my stomach. It was defrauding people like me as to what our work was being used for, and it was defrauding readers into thinking that, you know, that they were reading a local, honest publication that they could trust. And are you still working for Franklin Archer? No, I am not. I always went for the things that I thought had integrity. And community

journalism, you know, which I feel very, very strongly about, is stuff that I did because I believed in it, even if it was small-town stuff, you know. Small-town stuff is important. You want to know where your water comes from, you know. Is there stuff in your water? Why did my cable bill double? So I would never, ever, ever write for, you know, anybody who is deliberately deceiving people and entire groups of people

for profit. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Data released on Tuesday from the crucial swing state of Florida shows that 6.4 million people have already voted in the state, shows that 6.4 million people have already voted in the state, more than two-thirds the number who voted in the entire 2016 election. The data shows that Democrats initially built up an advantage by mailing in far more ballots than Republicans,

but that Republicans have begun eating into Democrats' lead by casting more early in-person votes. Nationwide, as of Tuesday afternoon, more than 69.5 million Americans had already mailed in their ballots or voted early in person. A record high early vote. And... Let me say this.

I lived in the White House for a while. You know, it's a controlled environment. You can take some preventive measures in the White House to avoid getting sick. Former President Barack Obama, who has avoided direct criticism of President Trump for much of the past four years, delivered his most stinging and personal rebuke yet on Tuesday during a rally in Florida. Except this guy can't seem to do it. He's turned the White House into a hot zone. Obama, campaigning for Joe Biden, expressed bewilderment that Trump had contracted the virus

and dismay at the way Trump has talked about the pandemic. And what's his closing argument? That people are too focused on COVID. He said this at one of his rallies. COVID, COVID, COVID, he's complaining. He's jealous of COVID's media coverage. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.