Now we’re getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news

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Reading sad things about journalism — newspapers, especially — has been a big part of my job for almost two decades. On Monday, I came across such a story that seemed to be getting traction on social media. According to the link aggregator Sill, 18 people I follow on Bluesky had shared a link to it within a few hours.

The headline was a grabber: “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama: How a Media Startup Killed 47 Weekly Newspapers and No One Noticed.” It was a site named The Editorial, whose name rang a vague bell for me.

I clicked through. The subhead: “Inside the rise and collapse of 1819 News, the right-wing media chain that bought up rural weeklies, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI-generated content.”

I’d heard of 1819 News, of course, though not for good reasons. The conservative news site, named for Alabama’s statehood year, made national news for writing what seemed to many like needless stories exposing a small-town mayor’s crossdressing habit; 48 hours later, the mayor committed suicide. (1819 News’ editor-in-chief later said he was “at peace” with the decision to publish.) But I hadn’t heard anything about them buying up a bunch of weekly newspapers, so I read on.

The story in The Editorial, by Elena Marchetti, was meaty — about 1,900 words — and seemed to feature some good on-the-ground work. It reported that, in 2023, a new company named Alabama Community News LLC spent $3.2 million — money it got from 1819 News — buying up 47 different weekly newspapers in small towns across the state. The goal: to “use the papers’ subscriber lists and advertising relationships to build a statewide conservative media empire.”

The new corporation immediately centralized operations across all papers, cutting back on staff and turning to AI for stories:

By August 2023, [a 26-year-old former campaign staffer named Derek] Haynes was writing or generating approximately 70 percent of the content for all forty-seven papers. The AI produced school board meeting summaries by scraping county government websites; it wrote sports recaps by pulling box scores from the Alabama High School Athletic Association database; it generated obituaries by filtering social media memorial posts. The obituaries were a particular problem. “The AI didn’t know if someone had predeceased relatives or what church they attended,” Haynes says. “We got complaints. A lot of complaints.”

Circulation plummeted, advertisers bailed, and promised revenue never came. Within 18 months, Alabama Community News LLC filed for bankruptcy and dissolved, shuttering all 47 newspapers — turning dozens of counties into news deserts. The story had good color from several of the counties, showing some real-world impacts of these closures. The writing gets a little purple in places, but in ways I could imagine for a talented young reporter writing their first big feature.

This was a big deal — 47 counties losing their newspapers! Was it really possible no one outside Alabama had noticed, journalistically speaking? AL.com is an above-average local news operation — did they not cover this, or did it just not escape containment? I follow a healthy number of Deep South journalists on social media — did my East Coast blinders keep me from spotting it?

I started googling around, and it didn’t take long to figure out that I hadn’t missed anything. I checked on several of the allegedly dead newspapers — the St. Clair News-Aegis, the Clarke County Democrat, the Greene County Democrat, the Centreville Press — and they all seemed to be operational, still publishing regular content. An upset advertiser, Tolliver Chevrolet in Clanton, didn’t seem to exist. Neither did dedicated reader Dr. Thomasina Reed, who had “lived in Greensboro, Alabama, population 2,300, for forty-two years” and was “the only physician at the Hale County Rural Health Clinic,” which also doesn’t exist. Alabama Community News LLC is not a real corporation, and 1819 News never funded any roll-up of Alabama weeklies. It’s all fake.

I wasn’t the only one confused. “I’ve worked here since 2022, and we are very much alive, still do print and are growing,” Noah Wortham, managing editor of the Shelby County Reporter, told me. His paper is one of the weeklies The Editorial had marked for death; in reality, it’s been owned by Boone Newsmedia for many years.

“Looks like the AI alligator is consuming or manufacturing fake news,” said Thomas Michael Hobson, editor of the Centreville Press.

According to Rob Holbert, co-publisher of the Mobile weekly Lagniappe, the story was all the buzz in Alabama journalism circles: “The messages started coming in hot and heavy late Sunday night from people I know and respect.”

By Tuesday, the story had been taken down. First, it returned an “Article not found” error, but by the end of the day, that was replaced with a more detailed message:

The Editorial removed this article on June 30, 2026. Reason: Removed for fact-verification concerns — fabricated specifics not supported by sources.. [sic] We retract content when it fails our verification standards. See our methodology and corrections policies.

(Luckily, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine recorded a copy of it before the takedown. One more reason to love the Internet Archive. Here’s a screenshot, too.)

Fake news isn’t new, obviously. And while AI-generated slop is newer, it’s hardly unfamiliar by now. But why would a spam site bother making up a story about Alabama weekly newspapers, of all things? Whose interest is it in to get that niche?

Not the first offense

It turns out that The Editorial was vaguely familiar to me because a local reporter up here in Boston, Heidi Legg, runs an unrelated site named The Editorial which features her interviews with area artists, scientists, scholars, and such. Heidi’s site is real and at theeditorial.com; the Alabama story was at theeditorial.news. They don’t have anything to do with each other.

Looking into The Editorial — the fake one — I noticed that this Alabama piece wasn’t the first time it had written made-up stories about local American newspapers in crisis. In fact, it seems to be a thriving little subgenre for the site.

The 627 Empty Desks: How Texas Killed Its Weekly Newspapers and the Truth Went With Them

Across the 254 counties of Texas, the collapse of local journalism has created information vacuums that oligarchs, cartels, and politicians are filling.

Nashville Tennessean, 1812–2026: Inside the Newsroom That Voted to Close Itself

Gannett offered severance or one year at half salary. The staff chose neither. They asked to shut the paper and walked out together.

The Last Press Run: Why America Loses a Newspaper Every Week and No One Cares

Newspapers are dying at a rate of one per week. In Danville, Illinois, the final edition of the Commercial-News went to press on a Friday in May. The story of how it happened — and what it means.

Those first two were taken down by The Editorial when the Alabama story came down. The third is still online, somehow. (In reality, the Nashville Tennessean and Danville Commercial-News are still around.) Sadly, several other pieces taken down yesterday were not captured in time by the Wayback Machine. Their headlines, which I grabbed from Marchetti’s bio page before they were removed: “The Chattanooga Times Free Press Printed 118 Years. Its Owner Chose Pixels”; “Kenosha News, 1846-2026: The Publisher Who Walked Away After 180 Years”; and “Macon Telegraph, 1826-2026: How Georgia’s Oldest Newspaper Collapsed in Fifteen Months.”

These stories are, to me, surprisingly good. Not good as in true, of course, but good as in effective at keeping up the illusion of reality. For me, they have only a light whiff of AI writing — mostly when people are quoted. (Example: “‘This is not a newspaper,’ she says. ‘This is a ghost.’”) The newspaper names are real; there are lots of real names and institutions sprinkled in among the fakery. They’re long and they hold together.

All of these newspaper stories were by “Elena Marchetti,” whose articles page on The Editorial suggests she roughly splits her time between decrying the death of American newspapers and writing about tensions in the South China Sea. (More about that below.) Her bio: “Previously at The Atlantic and ProPublica. Winner of the IRE Award for investigative reporting.” Those claims, you won’t be surprised to learn, do not seem to check out.

(The site’s other “reporters” feature similarly unsupported CVs. James Okwonko “has reported from 47 countries over two decades” and is a “former BBC World Service correspondent.” Economics reporter Sara Lindquist “previously covered the Fed for Reuters.” I can find no Lindquist or Okwonko bylines appear at the BBC World Service or Reuters, respectively. Tech reporter David Chen, meanwhile, is a “former engineer at two major AI labs.” Their three linked Twitter accounts have a total of three followers.)

A Chinese connection?

So who might be behind The Editorial? Its domain registration is cloaked. Its about page lists no owner but describes its founder as “Enok Nordberg,” a name that appears online only in Scandinavian genealogical records.

The site has a donations page, and its attached Stripe account connects to Nordiso Group, which describes itself as “a Finnish technology company delivering enterprise-grade software solutions, cybersecurity services, and cloud infrastructure.” A PayPal link points to [email protected]. One of the few names on the site that has much of an online trail is Frank Simplice Masabo, who is listed as The Editorial’s “Senior Tech & Science Editor.” His Twitter account and GitHub account both link to nordiso.com. Nordiso publishes iOS and Android apps named “Examtly – AI Study Assistant,” whose developer is listed as Masabo; Masabo is listed as the registered contact for Nordiso in Finnish corporate records.

I’ve emailed Masabo to ask about the site and will update if he replies. (A Frank Simplice Masabo posted in January that his Google Ads account had been “suspended for unacceptable business practices…What can I do to get Google to reactivate it?”) But why would a Finnish developer care about newspapers in Alabama?

Let’s look through The Editorial’s other content. Scanning the homepage, one topic stands out: Taiwan. “Elena Marchetti” has “written” more than a dozen stories on Taiwan’s relationship with mainland China, most of which seem to undermine Taiwan’s strategic position.

The U.S. is not committed to defending the island, one article argues, giving China “a green light for invasion.” Taiwan knows there are 41 Chinese secret operatives working within its government, another claims, but it’s too weak to do anything about them. Taiwanese chip giant TSMC is prepared to move its operations overseas in the event of an invasion, another article claims, meaning “Taiwan becomes less essential — and therefore more vulnerable.”

The stories’ AI origins are made clear by their ledes, which feature variants of the same scene: a “nondescript,” “windowless,” “secure” conference room on a specific floor of a specific building, where one man is passing a secret document across a table. (Also, it’s often humid.)

On the second floor of a nondescript office building in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District, in a conference room with no windows, on a Friday evening in late March, a man in civilian clothes spread eight pages of a computer-printed document across a laminate table. He had served twenty-two years in the Republic of China Armed Forces, the last five in the Ministry of National Defense’s strategic planning directorate. He was not authorised to share what he was about to share.

In a soundproofed room on the seventh floor of Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, on a humid evening in late August 2024, the deputy minister of strategic planning laid a single sheet of paper on a mahogany table and said: “They told us no. Not for this generation.”

In a nondescript government archive building in Taipei, on a humid October morning in 2025, a retired diplomat opened a locked filing cabinet and pulled out a folder he had not touched in more than thirty years. The folder, stamped with the seal of the Straits Exchange Foundation, contained six pages of handwritten notes, two draft telegrams, and a single typed memorandum dated October 29, 1992. “This is what they call the 1992 Consensus,” the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still consults for the government, told The Editorial. “But there was no consensus. There was an agreement to disagree. And now Beijing is using the word to justify war.”

In a secure conference room on the seventh floor of the Pentagon’s C-Ring, in late February 2026, a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst slid a USB drive across the table and said: “You need to read this before the next Taiwan Strait crisis — because we are not ready.” The analyst, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss the document publicly, had spent the previous nine months compiling what he described as the most detailed unclassified assessment of the People’s Liberation Army’s plan to bring Taiwan to its knees without firing a single shot at a city.

In a windowless conference room on the fifth floor of the Pentagon’s C-Ring, on a Tuesday afternoon in late March, a senior intelligence officer assigned to U.S. Indo-Pacific Command slid a single-page document across a table. The briefing, marked “TOP SECRET // NOFORN // ORCON,” was titled “PRC Two-Front Strategy: Feasibility and Timeline, 2026-2028.” The officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to discuss classified matters publicly, waited until the door clicked shut. “We have two years,” he said. “Maybe less.”

On a Thursday evening in late March 2026, a senior official in Taiwan’s National Security Bureau pulled a bound report from a locked drawer in an office on Chongqing South Road, in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District. The document was ninety-three pages long, printed on pale yellow paper, stamped with a red classification marking: 絕對機密 — Absolutely Secret. The official, who spoke to The Editorial on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to disclose the matter publicly, said they had been carrying it home every night for three weeks, trying to decide what to do.

In a private dining room on the forty-third floor of the Grand Hyatt Taipei, on the evening of November 7, 2023, a semiconductor equipment executive from Hsinchu sat across from two officials he’d been told represented China’s Taiwan Affairs Office. One of them, a man in his early fifties who introduced himself only as Director Chen, slid a bound presentation across the table. The first page bore the seal of the State Council. The second page listed incentives: tax rebates worth NT$12 billion over five years if the executive relocated his company’s intellectual property to Xiamen. Subsidized loans. Expedited regulatory approval. Guaranteed contracts with mainland SOEs.

Every single “Politics” story The Editorial has published in the past eight weeks has been about Taiwan. The site has a separate “Asia” section that also features story after story showing Chinese strength against its regional rivals. Japan’s coasts are being flooded with Chinese surveillance drones, and it’s Japan’s own military buildup that’s to blame. “Japan has no counter-strategy that does not risk war” against the Chinese “slow erosion” of its sovereignty. Chinese officials are outsmarting Western companies for control over Kazakh uranium deposits. “The U.S.-China relationship is worse than at any point since normalization in 1979…China’s military growth is real and its territorial ambitions are clear…Every missile Japan deploys gives Beijing justification to deploy more.”

Of the 24 “Asia” stories on the site, only one is directly about China — as opposed to about China’s caginess and strength in relation to some other nation. (That piece focuses on Xi Jinping’s “anti-corruption drive.”) These stories, by “David Chan,” seem to use a different setting on whichever Mad-Libs Lede Machine is writing their tops:

By the time you read this, the camp at the edge of Paju will have grown by another thirty people. That is how it works here. The mothers come first, then the children, then sometimes the men. They carry nothing but a plastic bag, a child’s hand, and the memory of a country that has already written them off.

By the time you read this, somewhere under the Demilitarized Zone, a North Korean soldier will have moved a ton of concrete, one shovel at a time. Not by machine — the drills are too loud, too easy to detect. By hand. That is how it works here now.

By the time you read this, the protest camp at Gwanghwamun Square will have been dismantled and reassembled nine more times. That is how it works here. Seven months after President Yoon Suk Yeol’s midnight martial law decree stunned the nation, the same faces—retired teachers with faded union jackets, university students who sleep in two-hour shifts, grandmothers who remember Park Chung-hee’s dictatorship—return each evening to a square that has become the conscience of a country unsure whether its democracy survived.

I can’t say for sure who or what is behind The Editorial. Is it one Finnish guy trying to make money with Google Ads? (I can’t see any ads, affiliate links, or other monetization efforts on the site beyond the request for donations.) Is it a Chinese government-backed psyop campaign to promote the weakness of its geopolitical rivals? (The Editorial’s Africa vertical is relentlessly negative, story after story of government sins, the failures of pan-African organizations, and Western countries abusing the region — which could be an argument for China’s growing role on the continent.) Is writing about the death of local newspapers meant to be a statement on the United States’ soul-deep corruption? Or just a way to cheaply spam out a bunch of content that can be repeated across locations — Nashville today, Macon tomorrow, Kenosha next week?

But it’s a useful reminder that AI has made fakery easy enough that it can come from unexpected directions — even a niche you know a lot about and which you wouldn’t expect to be worth the effort.

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