GoKawiilReading 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 towns losing their newspapers! Was it really possible that 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.
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