Phantom AI-Generated News Websites Are Taking Over Old Community Newspapers

If you believe the internet, in his first month at the Ashland Daily Tidings, reporter Joe Minihane skied the slopes of Mount Ashland, ate at 15 restaurants in Roseburg, hiked the Owyhee Canyonlands in Malheur County, took in Autzen Stadium and Multnomah Falls, and visited the Neskowin Ghost Forest on the Oregon Coast.

And sure, more than 1,200 miles of travel to write 10 stories in a month might seem excessive for a local outdoors reporter who was new to his Southern Oregon job, but who could argue with his output?

Minihane could.

“I mean, the bylines are just bizarre because they’re on topics a) of which I have no understanding and b) I’ve been to Oregon once in my life for a very, very lovely holiday in Portland,” the United Kingdom-based writer told OPB.

The Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known. Almost as soon as it closed, a website for the Tidings reemerged, boasting a team of eight reporters, Minihane included, who cranked out densely reported stories every few days.

And those reporters were covering a lot more than local news. They dove into Oregon’s fentanyl crisis (“Measure 110 might be in for a repeal”), homelessness in Eugene (“All In Lane County homeless program delivers impressive results”), and the food scene in Portland (“The fourth best burger in the U.S. is in Portland”) — essentially any issue that might draw attention from Oregonians.

The reality was that none of the people allegedly working for the Ashland Daily Tidings existed, or at least were who they claimed to be. The bylines listed on Daily Tidings articles were put there by scammers using artificial intelligence, and in some cases stolen identities, to dupe local readers.

“It seems quite terrifying,” said Minihane, an actual journalist and author who learned he had his identity stolen after OPB contacted him. “I have friends who live in Portland, but I’ve never been to another part of the state, so I just don’t know quite how it came to pass.”

The mysterious takeover of a more than 140-year-old news outlet offers a warning of how local news is at risk of disappearing in Oregon’s rural communities, and what an online future supercharged by the next unregulated wave of technology from Silicon Valley companies may hold for news consumers.

From the ashes, more ashes

The number of people working in journalism in Jackson County, like the entire country, has been precipitously declining since adoption of the internet began to grow in the early 2000s. Most analyses of this era point to the rise of consumer-focused tools like Craigslist, which took a roughly $5 billion bite out of local news through the loss of classified ads, as the start of a long slide in the news business. Fact-based news reporting, which takes time, also has failed to keep up with online demands for the latest content available at the touch of a device. Readers and the advertising dollars that follow them have flocked to social media and other online platforms.

Jackson County’s current phase of local media, including the ongoing, bizarre operation of the Ashland Daily Tidings, could be seen as beginning in 2017. That’s when Rosebud Media and its owner — an entrepreneur with technology, broadcast and advertising experience — plucked the Mail Tribune and the Daily Tidings from the grip of the hedge fund-backed GateHouse Media, which later merged with another powerhouse publisher, Gannett.

The move offered some hope that Rosebud Media’s vision would preserve what remained of the local journalism that had been pared back by large companies focused primarily on profits.

Related: The state of Oregon’s local media in 4 charts

The hope didn’t last. In January 2023, after several initiatives meant to stabilize the papers, Rosebud Media closed down both for good. The move meant an unceremonious end to Oregon’s first Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, the Mail Tribune, which earned the award in 1934 for public service by condemning local politicians who supported racial grievances of the Ku Klux Klan and the violent takeover of local government coming out of the Great Depression.

The East Oregonian Media Group — a family-owned newspaper chain across rural parts of Oregon and Southwest Washington — stepped in after Rosebud’s closure, and earned heaps of praise when it announced plans to open a local newspaper that would replace the Mail Tribune.

That hope didn’t last either. In late October, EO Media Group announced it was selling its roughly dozen newspapers, including the Rogue Valley Times in Medford, to Carpenter Media Group. The Mississippi-based company — now the fourth-largest newspaper owner in the country — had been on a Northwest newspaper buying spree and boasted of its commitment to “high quality, community focused journalism” before laying off an untold number of reporters and editors in the Portland suburbs, Central Oregon, Eastern Oregon, Southern Oregon and Everett, Washington.

This cycle of a new owner buying a local newspaper every few years — only for more journalists to lose their jobs shortly after the sale — is not unique to Jackson County. Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, which tracks media outlet sales and layoffs in an annual report, estimates the year from 2022 to 2023 saw a rapid loss of 7,000 newspaper-related jobs across the country compared to just a few hundred the year before. According to Medill’s data, nearly every county east of the Cascades in Oregon has two or fewer local news sources. Most have a single source, and six counties have no local news outlet at all.

The result of all these consolidations and job losses is less information being reported locally for Oregonians, particularly those in rural communities who are seeing papers close at troubling rates, according to Medill’s mapping of news deserts.

Plagiarism, by any other name

The mysterious emergence of AI invaders on the local news scene is a new development in Oregon, and the Ashland Daily Tidings website appears designed to hide its true operators.

After Rosebud Media closed in 2023, the Daily Tidings website emerged again with a claimed staff of eight contributors, none of whom are reporters working in Southern Oregon. Two of the writers have sparse social media presences that suggest they live in South Africa. Neither responded to a request for comment from OPB, though one did share a social media post in November praising artificial intelligence. “Try to learn Artificial intelligence and don’t curse in AI. Do your hard work and Update your skills,” they wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Two of the writers on the Daily Tidings website are actually correspondents for the London-based Daily Mail. Another two have actually worked as journalists in Southern Oregon. One supposed writer has no online presence as a journalist outside the Daily Tidings website.

OPB used various methods to track down all of the listed reporters on the Southern Oregon webpage, including searching social media and contacting former employers. After OPB began reaching out to people credited on the Tidings’ stories, more than half the staff disappeared from the page and their bylines were replaced on existing stories. Three journalists who responded to OPB’s requests for comment said they had no idea their names or images were being used to produce stories for the Daily Tidings.

“Plagiarism, I think it’s called,” quipped Bert Etling, the former editor of the Daily Tidings who now runs the digital nonprofit media outlet Ashland.news.

Etling, who started his local journalism career in 1982 and was laid off in 2019 by Rosebud Media, noticed the revived Daily Tidings soon after it emerged because his own reporters saw work remarkably similar to their own appearing on the webpage. The stories would have fresh headlines and the writing would be tweaked, but the reporting and quotes from sources would closely match work Ashland.news had previously published. OPB staff members have also had their work taken and republished on the Daily Tidings website with marginally changed sentences.

“They just put it in a blender and then pour it out on their page,” Etling said. “It’s maddening.”

Since artificial intelligence’s wider adoption by the public in the past two years, journalism has been a regular target for scams that further threaten the business of producing news. A New York-based journalist collective, 404 Media, was among the first to notice a trend of fraudulent websites taking real stories and using AI “spinners” to rewrite the articles with the goal of grabbing web traffic. Other reporting revealed a Serbian DJ who pretended to operate a news outlet in a Minneapolis suburb, only to leave local readers confused when they’d click stories to find AI-generated content that had nothing to do with Minnesota.

The Daily Tidings appears to be the first time an Oregon news outlet has stolen the identities of real journalists to trick local readers with AI-generated content. The goal is apparently to deceive Oregonians into giving clicks — and the resulting ad revenue — to whoever is behind the website.

The source

The Daily Tidings wasn’t the first time Joe Minihane had his work, or his identity, ripped off using AI.

In March, someone took over the webpage domain for Minihane’s personal website after he didn’t pay to renew his ownership. Whoever grabbed the site filled it with mundane prose that vaunted Minihane’s ability as a journalist — and his ability to write essays. The purpose for the website takeover appears in links subtly embedded throughout, which offer to sell high school students essays for their homework.

“I find it fascinating when the bots write about you in the third person,” he told OPB. “I can’t get to the bottom of these things.”

A similar type of theft may be behind whatever is happening at the Ashland Daily Tidings.

The Daily Tidings claims on its website that it was acquired by Difference Media, LLC, in 2021. Difference Media was founded by a father and son in Texas to promote Christian music. Speaking to OPB, a company official said they were not aware of the Daily Tidings and that the company owns no newspapers.

OPB reached out to the operators of the Daily Tidings through the website’s contact form and listed email for the paper’s news desk, but received no reply.

The alleged timeline of the Difference Media purchase also does not line up with the Daily Tidings’ prior ownership.

When owner Steve Saslow closed Rosebud Media in 2023, the web domain for the Ashland Daily Tidings and the Medford Mail Tribune became inactive, creating an opportunity for the fraudulent version to replace it.

In his first interview since closing the papers, Saslow told OPB he had his attorneys pursue litigation against whomever is behind the AI-written stories for copyright infringement. The lawyers told him the fraudulent acts are coming from outside the United States, likely in China, and they described the legal quest as akin to “pursuing a phantom.”

“They do this apparently with either existing or defunct newspapers around the world,” Saslow said. “[My lawyers] said you could go and spend all kinds of money, and trying to find them would be a needle in a haystack if we could do it at all.”

Saslow opted not to spend that money chasing down the fraudsters. There’s little doubt money is the reason behind the fraud, however.

The Daily Tidings website, despite its reliance on copyright infringement and stolen identities, presents readers with banners and pop-up videos from major advertisement-serving companies on the internet, such as Google, YieldMo and the Trade Desk. Display ads like those on the website can earn the site’s operators a few dollars for each 1,000 appearances the ads make, potentially making the endless churn of stolen stories a lucrative business. It’s unclear exactly how much money the Daily Tidings is generating each year from such ad placements.

After being alerted to the scam by OPB, Google took action against the Daily Tidings website by removing its ads from specific pages on the website the tech giant viewed as violating its terms of service.

“We have strict publisher policies that govern the types of content we allow to monetize. Upon reviewing the site in question, we have taken action to demonetize the pages where we identified violations of these policies,” spokesperson Nate Funkhouser said in an email.

The main landing page of the Daily Tidings continued to serve advertisements from Google and other companies as of Dec. 2. Other advertisement-serving companies that appear to be providing income to the Daily Tidings did not respond to OPB’s requests for comment.

The future of local journalism

Saslow said he started Rosebud Media because he saw the old models for local journalism had created a business that only seemed to recede as online platforms advanced. From his perspective, local readers would be the big losers if nothing changed.

“It really was about the true sense of journalism,” he said. “That’s why I named the thing Rosebud. It was a joke from the movie ‘Citizen Kane.’ He thought he could control everything and the answer was no, that’s what you don’t want.”

A desire to experiment led Saslow to partner with Sinclair Broadcast Group to produce some video content with his former reporters. Saslow hoped the experimentation with print, video and online stories would be an attractive package for advertisers who want the maximum number of eyeballs for their dollars. While that effort didn’t translate to advertisers writing bigger checks, Saslow said he isn’t giving up his goal of finding a formula that makes local journalism financially stable. As early as 2025, he said, he’d like to return to Southern Oregon with a new venture that ties together local and national issues in a way that could be a single stop for readers inundated with information.

“You’ve got to have this mix of everything that would affect a person’s life,” Saslow said. “There’s going to be a breakthrough where somebody basically is able to evolve news to something that is completely different.”

The future of local journalism in Oregon likely depends on whether its decadeslong retrenchment continues under the growing pressures of Silicon Valley’s push into artificial intelligence, or if the remaining media outlets in the state can convince their readers that human-verified information is a necessity. Ashland.news, the digital startup led by Etling, is taking some decidedly old-school approaches to help his publication. Even as his reporters are competing with social media posts from the zombified Daily Tidings, Etling said he is constantly thinking about how he can prove to the people living in the Rogue Valley that local journalism is worth saving.

“People had it easy with the subsidized newspaper,” he said. “It was subsidized by capitalism-assisted democracy — by selling sofas and mattresses on the pages of your newspaper and making it really cheap to get. That’s gone away, and it’s not coming back.”

Etling doesn’t know what will replace journalism’s long dead revenue sources of classified advertisements and public notices, but he believes the nonprofit model Ashland.news follows — one built on giving well-reported local stories to a local audience — could hold some clues.

Rather than chasing profits, the company has tried to offer its readers a simple value proposition: We live here, and we want to tell you stories about this community.

Ashland.news doesn’t have billions of dollars in venture capital behind it like the largest artificial intelligence companies, but it does have an edge those companies don’t have: people who live in the community they’re covering. This year, the outlet’s staff marched in the Fourth of July parade. The response surprised Etling.

“People were hollering out, ‘We love Ashland News!’ and ‘Thank you!’” he said. “It was really gratifying.”

The company also recently sent a print edition — a surprising move for a digital outlet — to 17,000 mailboxes in Ashland and nearby Talent as another way to reach people who may not know their local journalism is at risk of going away.

Those curated appeals to local readers may be working, too. Etling estimates Ashland.news has around 4,750 newsletter subscribers — more than three times the number of people who subscribed to the Daily Tidings when he was editor.