January 8, 2026 - 7:00pm
The announcement this week that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette — one of the nation’s oldest newspapers — will finally kick the bucket on 3 May should surprise no one. The newspaper industry has been evaporating in slow motion over the last four decades, and there’s a better chance that you’ve watched the Peacock sitcom The Paper in the past few months rather than read an honest-to-goodness print rag.
For a growing number of Americans, this is actually good news. Trust in local news organisations has declined over the last decade from 82% in 2016 to 70% in 2024, according to Pew, and it’s even worse among Republicans or GOP-leaning independents (64%). But the problem with dancing on old journalism’s grave, even if many of its wounds are self-inflicted, is what rises up to replace it: biased TikTokers and influencers, partisan nonprofits or billionaire-funded outlets, or locally trained artificial intelligence LLMs.
Spoiler alert: it’s not better.
Consider the highly publicised case of Nick Shirley. The 23-year-old YouTuber blew up the internet with supposed proof that he’d uncovered a “billion-dollar fraud scandal” involving Somali-run child care centres in Minnesota. It was perfect fodder for the internet engagement machines: gotcha journalism, xenophobia, and anti-establishment furore all rolled into one clip. His video got over 116 million views on X and 3.4 million on YouTube, providing the Trump administration with the ammunition it needed to cut off child care funding to the entire state.
But look under the hood and it soon became clear that his work was full of holes. Shirley “exposed” some of these centres as fraudulent fronts simply because they were closed when he knocked. And at least two of the locations he visited were already non-operational or had moved. He didn’t have an editor to ask, “Hey, did you check their licensing status?” or “Is it possible they aren’t open on a Tuesday at 10:00 AM for a reason?” A professional journalist has a desk, a boss who hates them, and a legal department looking over all their shoulders. Shirley has a cellphone, and his editor was apparently the Minnesota GOP — not exactly an objective source.
The flaws in Shirley’s investigative work — and who’s behind it — undermine its seriousness. And there are, as the kids say, many such cases. Two articles in WIRED magazine in 2025 show that both prominent Left– and Right-wing online news influencers are often paid by dark money.
The other operations rushing to fill news deserts are “pink slime” outlets, a term I coined back in 2012 to describe newspapers or news sites that masquerade as trusted local brands to launder advocacy for political parties and special interests. That includes the Democratic Party-approved 11 local news sites run by Courier Newsroom, founded by Tara McGowan, a former operative for a Super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, Metric Media, which claims that it publishes “over 5 million news articles every month,” doesn’t disclose its Republican dark money funding in its 1,300+ local news sites that are filled with pro-GOP talking points.
Even more insidious is the “AI solution”. We are being told that LLMs will fill the gap, providing localised summaries for the busy citizen. But an AI is only as smart as its training data. AI needs real local reporting to function. If there is no Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to report the actual facts on the ground, the local AI will be forced to train on the only things left: Nick Shirley videos, partisan Twitter threads, and pink slime press releases.
For years, we’ve been told that the democratisation of the media would save us. We were promised a decentralised utopia where “citizen journalists” would hold power to account without the baggage of legacy gatekeepers. But it’s clear that we are building an information ecosystem where journalists — both human and AI — are churning out noise and confident lies about our own backyards.
That future is likely to play out in Pittsburgh sooner rather than later.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe