From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. 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. My colleagues Davey Alba and Jack Mickeys on the company trying to rewrite the rules of American journalism. It's Wednesday, October 28th. Ever since I was a little kid, I had a newspaper probably when I was six and I would go up the street and interview, I still remember there was like a lady from Sweden and an eye doctor and the priest from Ireland.

And I would interview them and get their life stories and would put up 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 act differently. So David and Jack, tell me about Pat Morris, so Pat Morris is a sixty nine year old freelance writer. She is now based in New Port Richey in Florida. Her entire career has been in journalism.

So I wound up writing for papers like the East Village, other New York A's, 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 Israel Light, which is I considered 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 Forum Park EGL in New Jersey and sort of thought that she would have a steady job there.

But I kind of took that job just in time for the financial collapse around 2008. I think the industry probably was collapsing in 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 twenty eighteen starts at a little known company called Franklin Archer, which she eventually starts to think of as a content mill. And 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 click bait we see beneath a lot of news articles like you'll never believe what these childish celebrities look like. Now, I totally click on those. Yes.

To more basic articles for maybe trade publications, et cetera.

And 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 US from where she lived in Florida.

And so I applied and I got a job as a 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 get paid on time all the time. It was direct deposit. It was weekly, and then it became every other week.

I never I got to say it never had an issue, you know, which was just a big draw when you were a freelancer, you know, that you knew like every week you were going to have even if it was just one hundred dollars, 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 community based stories. It wasn't hard news. It was all soft featuring stuff. You know, the police department having human trafficking awareness programs, the fire department doing whatever the fire department did, recycling as a company that does recycles plastic bags into tables, you know, that kind of thing.

The 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 or you're 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 can add to that, you know, she gets tons of assignment's chunks 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 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 class at the University of Illinois.

That was this absolutely enormous story about how a literature class was looking at a book that had sexual content and that was, oh, you know, sexual content and, you know, 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 they either quit the class or they quit school. And you know, I'm reading now this is really weird, and Pat asks a very reasonable fact checking question. So I went back to the reporter because, 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 the student who quit. Well, who was it? You know, and 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 OK, 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 Brian was.

Well, I was told, you know, Brian then I got emails from Brian Timpone, so I knew his name, which is pretty much all I knew until I was contacted by the Times that.

So you got a call from us? Yeah. And why were you calling Pat?

Well, we were reaching out to Pat because Dave 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 as kind.

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 altricial media today is that a lot of them produce as if we're in the previous era. They produce the same types of content that 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 Journatic. 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 I don't think they should all outsource their news production. Well, but isn't that what you do? Community news? Because they can't do it themselves.

OK, I think. But describe that. I mean, how 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 Timpone at this point. So much so that the Chicago Tribune actually fires its staff that covers the Chicago suburbs and uses Brian Timpone is 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? Mr. Canning tells the 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 Jenny.

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, cheese, some other fake names that have made their way onto the news sites of genetics clients and the real estate sections.

Harry Reid, Amy Anderson, Jay Brownstown, Christine Scott, Betty Rizzo, 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 Journatic, 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 genetic? 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 Timpone himself and appear to be based around the US. Huh.

And so what are they like? Well, I think I should just show you it's probably easiest. So let's go to a website called Thum, reporter, Thum, reporter, dot com and type that 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. OK, are you there, Thum reporter? Yeah, I'm on Thum Report.com. My first observation is it looks like a regular local news website. A lot of news stories, a lot of political news stories. Yeah, it's and it's a pretty clean, simple layout. It doesn't look real click Baity or anything. It's, you know, 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, you know, 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 governors covid policies. And there's another headline about a different Republican lawmaker complaining that the 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 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 a 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.

Hmm. And this is just one example of a website in the network. What we found is that there are almost thirteen hundred 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. I'm Christina Warren, a long time tech reporter, ever since I wrote my first lines of code as a teenager. I've known the technology can empower us to change the world. Now I'm the host of Networked the 5G Future, a new podcast from Verizon and T Brand at The New York Times on Networked. I'll connect with industry experts to learn how Verizon 5G can transform sports, health care and all the ways we work, live and thrive.

Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Monica Drak, assistant managing editor at The New York Times. We are living through a moment of uncertainty with life changing so quickly. We know that journalism quality, well sourced fact check journalism can play a crucial role in helping us navigate it all. We're reporting on every aspect of the US election from the candidates and their positions on the issues to how the pandemic affects the way we vote. Our journalists are writing about how the coronavirus has intensified racial inequalities, and they're following protests against police violence, which have become a global civil rights movement.

Across our newsroom, our colleagues are also thinking about how we can adapt to the new demands of daily life as we seek new ways to find joy coverage. This comprehensive would be impossible to accomplish without our subscribers. If you'd like to subscribe, go to NY Times dot com subscribe. 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, David, 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. And in many cases, we found evidence 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 Timpone 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.

So just so I have the straight Republican candidates, conservative donors are paying money to Brian Timpanist 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 writer is not to focus any article on a Democratic lawmaker or bill because their clients are Republicans. Wow.

I wonder 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 Main 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. Mm hmm.

So what we found is the reporter who wrote the 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 dollars attacking Sarah Gideon in the 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 that 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 Timpone to get the story written. We also know from public documents that gives his paid Timpone companies fifty five thousand dollars, 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 we were able to understand why Jeannie gives 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 site.

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 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 deeply held sense of what is ethical in journalism. And it is true is 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. Mm hmm. 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 we tried calling him, texting him, leaving a 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 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 two thousand one hundred newspapers have folded across the country since 2004, which is a 25 percent 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 market decline in civility in America.

When Americans know about their neighbor's 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.

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. You know, 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 where this kind of sacred, untouched corner of the news industry and stories coming out of the local school board of a local police department or your kids soccer game, those are told, is kind of straight news.

But if Brian Timpone 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 Timpone has said in a recent interview that he plans to create fifteen thousand more websites like this. This is only going to get bigger.

David 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 or my cable bill double.

So I would never, ever, ever write for, you know, anybody who was deliberately deceiving people and entire groups of people, you know, for profit. We'll be right back. Do you remember when texting meant tapping numbers to spell out every word or the first time you streamed a playlist without downloading Empathy's? I'm Christina Warren, the host of Network to the 5G Future, a new podcast from Verizon and T Brand at The New York Times. Each new network improves our lives in ways we couldn't imagine and to hear how 5G could reshape how we work, play and connect.

Listen to Networked the 5G future wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's what else you need to know, day data released on Tuesday from the crucial swing state of Florida shows that six point four 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 sixty nine point five 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 wants his closing argument.

That people are too focused on covid, he said this at one of his rallies, Colvert covid covid, he's complaining. He's jealous of corvids media coverage.

That's it for The Daily, I'm Michael Babara. See you tomorrow. As we plan for the future, city provides you with the financial expertise and agility you need to help you bank like your best days are ahead. That's tomorrow thinking empowering you to bank like you visit Citi dot com to get started member FDIC.