April 28, 2025, 12:49 p.m.
Editor's Note: This story first appeared in Margins to Mainstream, our new special report on alternative media. Click here for the entire issue.
In the lead-up to this year’s pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court election, some Badger State voters received copies of what appeared to be local newspapers, including the Kenosha Reporter, The Fox Cities News, and the Chippewa Valley Times, in the mail.
The articles inside favored conservative candidate Brad Schimel and were critical of liberal candidate Susan Crawford. While at first glance the pamphlets appeared to be community publications, they were in fact connected to a conservative media company called Metric Media. The slanted mailers are part of a broader trend that comes at a time when traditional local media is in crisis.
In recent years, the local newspaper industry has faced steep challenges. As readership and advertising revenue declined and costs rose, many newsrooms cut staff or closed their doors entirely.
More than 3,200 print newspapers have vanished since 2005, according to Northwestern University’s Local News Initiative. As local media dwindles, news deserts—areas with little to no consistent local reporting—continue to expand. As more and more communities go without traditional news organizations to cover the issues that matter most to them, partisan actors are capitalizing to fill the void.
Online outlets not-so-kindly referred to as “pink slime” have proliferated the media landscape in recent years. The term is believed to have been coined by journalist Ryan Smith as a nod to the slimy byproducts used in processed meats, which are sometimes used to pass off low-quality meats as better than they actually are.
These websites are designed to be mistaken for independent, standards-based local news organizations, but they are explicitly designed to serve a partisan or ideological agenda. Media experts who spoke to National Journal pointed to two major American players responsible for the creation of these outlets—Metric Media, which is conservative-leaning, and Courier Newsroom, which is left-leaning. In the pink-slime space, Metric Media is the biggest known network, with nearly 1,300 domains.
To the untrained eye, these websites’ titles mimic those of a local newspaper—witness Metric Media’s Alabama Business Daily or Central Virginia Times—but are often backfilled with filler and low-quality stories that appear to be addressing local issues. For example, the landing page for Metric Media’s Cleveland Reporter features both an antiabortion opinion piece and local high school basketball standout stars.
"I think it's particularly pernicious because they are posing as local news,” said Peter Adams, senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project. “They're hitching a ride on the credibility and the reputation of standards-based news organizations. They're also exploiting a kind of public cynicism that's out there, that ‘no source of information is playing it straight, no source of information is doing honest reporting.’ Which, of course, is not true.”
According to Columbia Journalism Review, Metric Media, led by former television reporter turned internet entrepreneur Brian Timpone, has financial ties to several conservative megadonors, including shipping magnate Richard Uihlein, tech investor Peter Thiel, and oil and gas tycoon Tim Dunn. While Metric did not respond to multiple requests to comment for this piece, Timpone told the Utah-based Deseret News in 2020 that “the goal of Metric Media is to rebuild and democratize community news across the country.” Courier’s founder and publisher, Tara McGowan, is a Democratic strategist possibly best known for founding the liberal nonprofit Acronym, which according to The Wall Street Journal has close ties to Democratic donors. Courier did not provide a comment for this story.
Neither of the networks’ partisan leanings are readily apparent. Metric Media has no reference to its affiliations, instead claiming to “give a voice to every citizen.” Courier, meanwhile, is self-described as a “values-driven” and “pro-democracy” news network.
“By not disclosing their partisan funding or partisan ties, whichever ones they may be, what they try to do is give themselves a sense of undisputed credibility so that readers do not think twice about the type of content that they are being fed,” said Chiara Vercellone, senior misinformation analyst at NewsGuard.
The outlets tend to be politically focused in their coverage and to be most active during election seasons. Adding insult to injury, these websites now outnumber legitimate local news sites in the United States.
Zach Metzger, who leads Northwestern/Medill’s State of Local News Project report, told National Journal that these sites exist to give the illusion of grassroots support for a cause or a candidate that may not actually exist.
"I think the sort of theory behind it is, 'We create 1,000 of these very, very low-quality, churned-out news sites; those links are going to get posted and shared on Facebook,'” Metzger said.
“People are going to click on them and they're going to think, 'Oh, wow, this small-town newspaper in rural Montana, and suburban Connecticut, and Florida and all around the country—all of these small-town newspapers, they're all being very supportive of tariffs! That must mean that there's actual grassroots local support for this issue.’”
Vercellone said that while pink-slime sites are largely associated with American politics, 2024 was a turning point in taking this trend international.
Last year, NewsGuard tracked a number of international players, including a network of Iranian-linked websites presenting as local American news outlets, as well as a network of pro-Kremlin sites masquerading as U.S. outlets operated by former Floridian and current Russian fugitive and propagandist John Mark Dougan. Vercellone added that her organization tracked pink-slime networks targeting Germany ahead of its elections this year.
"I think the only way that this is going is it's going to continue,” Vercellone said. “It doesn't seem like these networks or the actors behind them—be it political actors within the U.S., or foreign-state-sponsored malign actors—it doesn't seem like their motivations are going to end. And if we've learned anything from the 2024 cycle, it is that there's plenty of room for them to continue operating, unfortunately.”
