Mayor Mamdani’s Friendly Influencers and the Funding of Public Messaging in New York City

A look inside the new New York ecosystem.

By Anya Schiffrin

Whether he’s sitting with kids to promote pre-K, putting on a hard hat and holding a shovel to announce a new infrastructure project, riding a bicycle in support of bike lanes, or answering a question from an influencer on the street, Mayor Mamdani’s administration appears to be keeping busy promoting new policies and city services. The mayor’s office has held influencer-only press briefings, hired a host of new communications staffers, and created a network of influencers who push out his messages to their followers.

On TikTok and Instagram, influencers remind New Yorkers to vote, go to the doctor, participate in city budget talks, and compost their food waste.

Our forthcoming report, to be published by Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism and the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University, maps this new ecosystem and the changes that have taken place in New York City in 2026.

We reveal that there are two types of relationships in place. There are pilot programs aimed at using influencers on Instagram and TikTok to promote city services and initiatives including immigration rights, public budgeting processes, and tenants’ rights, as well as preexisting campaigns providing information about voting and healthcare.

There is also a newly created Signal group just for influencers, which was formed out of the Creators4Zohran group that supported the mayor’s election campaign. NYC Creators Announcements is run by Emilia Rowland, the director of new media and cultural communications at the NYC Office of the Mayor. Via the encrypted-messaging app, members receive daily updates, talking points, and clips to use in their posts. They are invited to events and offered interviews with city officials.

Influencers who are selected to join the group fill out an intake form that describes where they live and what topics they are interested in. They will then receive invitations targeted to their interests, such as being invited to join a neighborhood canvass or film the preparation of a canvass.

In many ways, the Signal group is similar to a traditional press list created and used by communications teams, in that the influencers receive updates and can decide what they choose to cover. There are, of course, clear differences between the work of journalists and social media influencers. These influencers have been criticized for not asking adversarial questions or doing tough investigative reporting. Influencers in the Signal group are not paid by the city for their coverage, although some are paid by city agencies for work on particular messaging campaigns.

The mayor’s communications team did not respond to repeated requests for a list of NYC Creators Announcements members. Members we interviewed say there are more than two hundred influencers in the group, ranging from micro-influencers with five thousand to ten thousand followers to some with millions of followers.

For our report, we compiled a list of 189 influencers with ties to the Mamdani administration. We used reverse image searches to create a list of those who attended the January press briefing and added other content creators who seem to share connections. We looked at the frequency of content they posted about the Mamdani administration and non-social-media information pointing to an existing relationship, including press coverage or publicly available information about contracts with city agencies.

As well as mapping the New York influencer ecosystem, we discuss how the influencers are selected and the types of collaborations that exist in the city. We are interested in formal and informal relationships and how these creators interact with more traditional journalists. We conclude with recommendations for best practices regarding disclosure of payments.

Background

City agencies have long tried to engage with New Yorkers and provide quality information, but the COVID-19 pandemic was an inflection point. The thousands of deaths created a sense of urgency for city officials, who knew they had to reach residents with important health information, especially those in underserved areas or in particular ethnic communities.

José Bayona, who served as the founding executive director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Ethnic and Community Media from January of 2022 to May of 2024, remembers that during the pandemic, “the outlets the city relied on to reach communities and promote vaccination were the ethnic and community media, and those outlets were the original influencers, because they held decades of community trust.” Bayona points to journalists such as Ricot Dupuy of Radio Soleil, a trusted voice in the Haitian community, as well as media outlets serving Latino, South Asian, Chinese, and other Caribbean communities.

In August of 2020, New York City Health + Hospitals, an independent agency funded by the government, began marketing campaigns with celebrities and paid online influencers, as well as traditional media outlets, to spread the word about COVID testing and later the vaccine.

Emily Golloub and Carmen Boon, who were the agency’s communications directors during the pandemic, wrote in a 2021 paper that for the Test & Trace campaign, the agency recruited twenty-four nano- (fewer than a thousand followers) and micro-influencers (between a thousand and a hundred thousand) with a total reach of twelve million followers. These creators posted targeted video content “based on guidelines and assets” provided by New York City Health + Hospitals, which paid to boost the videos online.

A number of city agencies continue to work with social media creators. “I can’t think of an agency that does not work with influencers,” said Natalia Goldstein, a digital media strategist with the NYC Campaign Finance Board, noting that the board expanded its efforts in 2021 and began to scale and bring in-house its influencer work in 2023.

In 2021, the MTA enlisted online content creator New York Nico (filmmaker Nicolas Heller) to get celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld, Remy Ma, and Fran Lebowitz to record announcements about good behavior on the subway, including reminders to give seats to people with disabilities and not to delay the trains by holding doors open.

Also in 2025, the Sanitation Foundation hired marketing firm Caryn Pace to use New York Nico as part of its broader campaign to remind New Yorkers not to litter. Belinda Mager, director of communications for the NYC Department of Sanitation, said in an email that the department received a one-time grant and hired influencers to spread the word about NYC’s composting program, which expanded to more city neighborhoods in 2024.

City employees we spoke to said that paying influencers to disseminate messages is only one way to reach New Yorkers. Paying influencers is cheaper than TV and radio advertising and can reach demographics that are not reached by traditional media outlets.

“Spending fifty thousand dollars on influencers gets you ten influencers who can replicate the message, while fifty thousand dollars on a TV ad is only one or two ads, and you cannot be sure anyone sees them, so talking about the math, that is the way to go. And once Mamdani won, he elevated all of this, and that is where we are today,” Bayona said.

The NYC Campaign Finance Board works with influencers as part of its mandate to reach underserved populations. Research in 2019 carried out by the board identified neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens that were underserved for voter outreach and education.

“NYC Votes was already really good at reaching voters who tend to turn out year after year, and influencers were a way to reach folks who weren’t already plugged in or following,” Goldstein said. NYC Votes is an initiative of the Campaign Finance Board and provides practical information about voter registration and election dates. “They’re reaching audiences we’re not reaching. We always ask about their audience breakdown—ages, location—so if we’re targeting youth, for example, we can confirm the fit, and we’re always looking for a large following in New York City.”

For their part, many influencers believe that transmitting information provided by the city and the mayor’s office is a public service and want to help. Some of the influencers we spoke to see themselves as filling a gap in the information ecosystem by providing and disseminating information their audiences might not otherwise be aware of.

Sari Beth Rosenberg, a public school US history teacher and digital content strategist for the American Federation of Teachers union, was one of the two hundred influencers invited by the Democratic National Committee to attend the 2024 convention. She has some four hundred and fifty thousand followers across multiple platforms and posts about history, political news, pop culture, her workout routine, and the importance of the teachers’ union.

Rosenberg views herself as providing information that is no longer easily accessible because of the hollowing-out of local news and the way online algorithms work. “A lot of people are too busy to seek out news about New York City, but they might follow my content or someone else’s, and might engage with it more, so that it’s going to pop up on their feed more,” she said.

Like Goodwin et al. (2023), we found that influencers were motivated by personal beliefs. They feel that their relationship with the city and the information they conveyed is useful for their followers and important for them to know. In their study of German influencers on YouTube, Fischer et al. (2022) describe this as “journalistic extension.” Influencers “commit themselves to journalistic ethics, but often with an alternative set of normative standards to fulfill traditional journalistic roles such as being a watchdog or giving voice to minorities—thereby embracing partiality to a greater extent than mainstream journalists.” In that sense, these influencers have points in common with the solutions journalism or civic journalism movements. But journalists point out that influencers don’t do the extensive watchdog reporting that well-funded media outlets are positioned to do.

Jose Vilson, an adjunct professor and education activist, has a PhD in sociology and education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Vilson posts about politics, education, racial justice, and New York City on his Instagram account, where he has twelve thousand followers. His posts include an interview with Afua Atta-Mensah, New York’s chief equity officer. Vilson recently interviewed legendary antitrust and competition scholar Lina Khan and Commissioner Sam Levine, arranged by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

“The majority of us don’t want to just be associated with Zohran,” Vilson said. “We want to ask good questions because we care about the city.” He describes his audience as “working-class people [aged twenty to sixty] who are trying to make sense of what is happening out there in the world.”

Other influencers say their personal support of the mayor is the reason they want to help. Diego León has a bachelor’s degree in childhood education as well as a master’s in literacy education. He was working as a preschool teacher in 2014 when he realized he could make more money as a content creator. On Instagram, where he posts as @dandyinthebronx, he focuses on sharp dressing and being a role model for young, low-income Bronx residents.

During Mamdani’s campaign, León got invited to an event in the Bronx and became even more of a supporter than he was previously. León says that Mamdani has shown that New Yorkers can have a better life, and the mayor’s videos on Instagram convey that message and also show what the mayor is doing to improve the city.

“I didn’t know about the government until Zohran showed up. Adams, de Blasio, Bloomberg were just guys on TV. What were our mayors doing for the last thirty years? These people literally did not exist to me,” León said.

Influencer Contract Agreements

Despite the fact that taxpayer money is being spent on campaigns involving influencers, information about these relationships is closely guarded. The procurement notices signed with the marketing and advertising agencies that handle the influencer contracts do not list the names of content creators, and officials in the mayor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for information. This lack of transparency comes up frequently in debates about the role of journalistic social media influencers.

New York City agency employees told us that the going pay rate is five thousand to twenty thousand dollars per influencer campaign. The fees are paid to influencers who are given contracts by marketing and advertising agencies that have contracts with the city. The campaigns may involve cocreating content that includes messages the city agency wishes to promote. The influencers are hired as independent contractors; under New York State law, this gives them autonomy and, city officials said, contributes to their freedom from editorial interference. For example, they may refuse to put a city announcement early on in their video.

City officials and influencers we spoke to told us that some influencers will offer discounts or even work for free because they want to support Mamdani, and that they benefit from the traffic that comes from being associated with the mayor. City employees outside the mayor’s communications office told us that having a small budget means they cannot get influencers to work with them. “I do believe they are really helpful. Just haven’t been able to get them to work for us, generally, with our very limited/nonexistent ad budget,” said a member of the Public Engagement Unit, which was created to provide information about tenant and housing rights, among other topics. Meanwhile, city agencies with large followings are able to get influencers to work for free because the influencers want the traffic.

Not being paid gives influencers freedom from editorial interference, which some of them appreciate. “I have not received a dime, and I think that’s fine,” Vilson said. “It gets weird, for example, when you have a legit critique of someone who happens to be paying you. I would rather keep the lines clear, as someone thinking of social impact as opposed to just content creation.”

Access to important figures has always been viewed as a form of currency in journalism. Journalists need access to experts, government officials, and sources who can provide background information, original insights, and breaking news. Interviews with important figures can boost circulation and elevate the importance of the journalists who do those interviews.

Historically, figures such as the New York Times columnists Flora Lewis and Thomas L. Friedman or the Wall Street Journal’s Karen Elliott House were considered celebrities in their own right, but were often ridiculed for being too friendly with the people they covered. Access journalism can lead to what Joseph E. Stiglitz describes as “cognitive capture,” in which reporters become so close to their sources that they begin to take on the worldview of those sources.

This leads to the paradox of influencer credibility, noted by some of our interviewees. Credibility is earned because a messenger or a message is trusted, but many of the influencers and content creators are paid for content that is designed to look authentic.

“Influencer-created content will look more like something that isn’t paid,” said one communications staffer who works with influencers. “If we’re boosting a video of an influencer talking to a camera, people are more likely to stop and watch without realizing it’s an ad. It’s a little sneaky, but that’s the idea. It’s good to have a mix of content types in our ad campaigns so we get information about what performs better.”

While some paid promotions are clearly labeled as such, others are not. We found that labeling is inconsistent. New York City Health + Hospitals uses a #paidpartnership hashtag for announcements such as actor Grasie Mercedes encouraging menopausal women to make doctor appointments. A video with Clarence Angelo talking about going to the Pride Parade and telling people about vaccines and other services also has a #paidpartnership label. The Campaign Finance Board uses #NYCVotesPartner, while influencers promoting the Civic Engagement Commission have used @nyccec and @thePeoplesMoney.

Is the Money Spent on Influencers Worth It?

There is a question of whether influencers have any impact beyond raising awareness. The influencers we interviewed say they don’t really know. But they believe that providing accurate information about New York City is important in its own right.

Those we interviewed say the main metric they focus on is the engagement rate, which they define as audiences showing some sort of reaction, such as a heart or a like. They note that one of the limitations of advertising on radio and television is that it is difficult to see audience reactions. So while engagement rates online do not reveal audience behavior after exposure to a message, they do indicate some sort of response. According to Goldstein, “because each influencer has a different audience makeup, we mostly look at engagement rate, calculated based on their specific audience. As a rough guideline, 4 percent is strong, while 8 percent would be excellent.”

In addition to engagement rates, city officials may ask for information about when audiences click through to the relevant government website and how long they watch the video for.

Allia Mohamed is the cofounder and CEO of Openigloo, which provides information for tenants about housing in New York City. She pointed to an example of a video she made that directed people to the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal website, which provides building rental histories. After her post, the website crashed because so many people visited it.

Recommendations for New York

In our paper, we argue that the rapidly evolving environment of political relational influencers in New York City requires some regulation. The blurry lines between being a friendly content creator and a paid promoter for city programs is confusing. The lack of consistent disclosure is worrisome.

“This is the Wild West right now, and people are coming up with the rules themselves,” Rosenberg said. “I truly believe there need to be standards and federal policy around this. There are so many loopholes.”

When it comes to disclosure, the people we interviewed, including those who hire influencers, seemed uncertain as to what the laws were and suggested that consistent rules about disclosure of paid relationships would be a good idea.

“When we have a paid relationship, I don’t know that we include a direct ad disclosure,” one marketing person from a city agency told us. “Those videos tend to be integrated into our organic social and not categorized as an advertisement. My understanding is when we pay an influencer and it’s not an ad, then it’s a different thing. Influencer marketing is still undefined and still a new frontier.”

Standardizing how influencer collaborations are disclosed could help rebuild public trust. Regulation could also help prevent the future weaponization of these influencers in political campaigns. Analysts say there is a danger that influencers who benefit from their relationships with the city could be mobilized to support other politicians or campaigns in the future, and they worry about the potential risks.

Texas and California have focused on disclosure of payments, and New York has a proposal for paid political campaigns. Governments in France, Canada, and other parts of the US pay social media influencers to disseminate information about healthcare, voting, and climate change. The difference is that the European Union (EU) has rules.

In the EU, the consumer protection framework covers the case of influencers and paid relationships as well as the disclosure of political advertising. In all EU countries, influencers can be regulated as “audiovisual service providers”—provided they meet certain criteria, generally based on reach, frequency in posting content, and the presence of paid partnerships in their content—and are required to follow national media rules stemming from the Audiovisual Media Services Directive. In Spain, influencers are clearly mentioned in national media legislation under the term “users of special relevance,” and have to clearly disclose commercial relationships. Influencers may not use phrases like “thanks to” or “in collaboration with,” but have to clearly state the content is an advertisement or paid. This disclosure must be visible and repeated throughout the message. France has similarly strong regulations.

In our paper, we argue that New York could do more to require disclosure and transparency, and our paper concludes with a short list of recommendations.

Wyatt Christlieb contributed to this article.

Acknowledgments: Megan Sluzhevsky, Erich Munch, Emily Bell, Hana Joy, Tory Lysik, Dhrumil Mehta, Vicky Walker.

Polymarket’s AI is Feeding Users Fabricated Information

The prediction market fancies itself a “global truth machine” and a boon to journalism. Tow finds a very different reality.

By Tory Lysik

Polymarket, a betting website where users can place wagers on current events, publishes AI-generated news timelines on its website that are saturated with hallucinations ranging from misrepresentations and misattribution of news to outright fabricated references to nonexistent news stories, a Tow Center for Digital Journalism analysis finds.

The CEO of the site has called Polymarket “the global truth machine” and “News 2.0.” The site has struck up a partnership with Dow Jones that pipes its market probabilities into the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s. Polymarket positions itself as a boon to journalism and a source of information rather than just a place to gamble, as my colleague Klaudia Jaźwińska pointed out in April, but its misrepresentations of legitimate news content undermine these claims.

A Polymarket page where users can bet on the winner of the 2028 presidential election, for instance, starts with offering betting odds for each candidate. But scrolling down, users arrive at an experimental feature: the Market Context timeline that provides news about the race. One entry in that timeline is titled “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces a run for president in 2028,” and describes how this news “polarized the electorate” as “some investors reassessed her electability.” The summary is followed by a citation: the familiar logo of the Associated Press. But clicking the link takes users to a page that doesn’t exist, and Ocasio-Cortez has never announced a presidential run.

Six weeks after that initial entry, a follow-up annotation reported that Ocasio-Cortez had disclosed a campaign fundraising shortfall so severe that her market price collapsed by 40 percent. AP News was cited again. The link on this citation also goes to a page that doesn’t exist, with a URL that misspells her name.

The Tow Center for Digital Journalism downloaded every timeline on a betting market with at least $1 million at stake in 152 Polymarket markets in total, with over 65,000 individual entries. In the 2028 presidential election market alone we found more than a dozen examples of citations that linked out to nonexistent Associated Press stories. Almost a third of the markets containing annotations had URLs that cited the Associated Press, but didn’t link to real AP articles. The errors were concentrated in election-focused markets. We also found multiple examples of AI-generated summaries citing various news organizations that were either factually incorrect or misattributed.

Users could be significantly misinformed on events like the 2028 presidential election if they relied fully on these timelines. The timelines contain invented articles, misdirected links, and a fabricated campaign announcement. According to Polymarket, Ocasio-Cortez endorsed a rival in a California gubernatorial primary. Kamala Harris declined to run for California governor, plunged to a historic polling low—then, months later, gained momentum and announced a climate initiative. Pete Buttigieg withdrew from the 2028 race in March of 2026; a nonexistent AP News article was cited. Josh Shapiro lost his reelection bid in July of 2025, then won it in September of 2025.

We sent the Associated Press a list of 353 URLs that we found on Polymarket across the 152 markets. A spokesperson confirmed that they were not authentic AP stories. “AP News article URLs include an Item ID, and these URLs do not,” she said.

Citations in the timelines were also sometimes misdirected. An annotation reporting that Harris had hinted at a 2028 run in a CBS interview was labeled CNN, but the link pointed to Madison365, a community news website in Madison, Wisconsin. An annotation reporting that Ocasio-Cortez was weighing a presidential bid was labeled The Hill but linked to ROKK Solutions, a DC communications firm. A citation labeled Reuters linked to a local sports radio station. Citations labeled AP News linked to ABC News.

Each event on the AI-generated timeline comes with a price-movement explanation—“causing his market price to tumble,” “reflecting diminished expectations of a 2028 nomination.” And while the explanations are sometimes based on events that didn’t happen, the price movements they describe are real trades made by real people. AI-generated timelines appear more frequently on the platform’s highest-profile markets, where users have collectively staked millions of dollars.

Some of these incorrect citations can lead users to unreliable sources. For example, a Polymarket annotation on a market tracking a potential US-Iran agreement on May 23 told users the Financial Times had reported that the two countries reached a deal. It cited the Financial Times by name and included an article link.

But the link did not go to the Financial Times; it went to Pravda Trump (trump.news-pravda.com), a website identified as part of Portal Kombat, a coordinated and well-documented pro-Russian influence network.

Despite what the summary said, no news organizations had reported that a deal had been reached—because it hadn’t. A real Financial Times article published that day accurately reported something entirely different: the US and Iran were “edging closer” to an agreement, with President Trump himself putting the odds at 50/50.

The summary appears to have drawn not from the FT’s reporting, but from Pravda Trump, which had distorted the FT’s careful hedging into a done deal. The annotation did not just misdirect users to a fringe website. It repeated that website’s misreading of the underlying reporting—and attributed it to the Financial Times. According to our analysis, the news-pravda.com network is cited across Polymarket over a thousand times, and dozens of those instances’ links are disguised as coming from other news outlets such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. A spokesperson from the Financial Times told us, “We take the accurate attribution of our journalism seriously and are looking into this further.”

A closer look at the code reveals that the search results come from Linkup, a private AI search startup that builds a Web search API designed specifically for AI applications. It’s unclear if Polymarket is displaying results from Linkup directly or using information provided by Linkup to generate the timeline summaries.

Linkup’s website lists Polymarket as a case study of how customers use its API, but while every other case study on its website has additional details about implementation, the Polymarket case study says only, “More to come soon—Reach out for more information.” Linkup did not respond to our questions.

The section of the page that hosts these AI-generated timelines contains a paragraph-style information block and displays a small text warning that reads, “Experimental AI-generated summary referencing Polymarket data. This is not trading advice and plays no role in how this market resolves.”

Polymarket also shields itself from any obligation to the accuracy of that content with its US Rulebook, filed with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission most recently in November of 2025, which states that “the company shall have no duty or obligation to verify any information displayed on the trading system or otherwise.”

The website’s terms of use, to which users must agree when creating an account, add that Polymarket “strives to provide accurate information, but there is no guarantee or warranty that the information is updated, complete, or timely.” It asks users to acknowledge that they “are not relying on any of the information on the Site for any purpose” and should “take all steps to independently verify” information coming from the website.

That kind of language is standard across the internet, and courts have generally enforced it. But David Hoffman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School who studies how digital platforms use fine print, said that while this may make it harder for an individual to file suit, news organizations like the Financial Times may have grounds.

“Does the Financial Times have an argument that it’s being trademark-disparaged? That it’s being dragged through the mud? Yes. I think it has a bunch of different kinds of arguments that their product is looking bad through this consumer market,” he said. “Its claim doesn’t depend on whether or not Polymarket is liable to its end users. It has an individual claim against Polymarket itself.” (Polymarket did not respond to a detailed list of questions.)

Hoffman also said a state attorney general pursuing a deceptive trade practices case would face a lower bar than an individual user. “State government action isn’t affected by individual consumer clauses that are basically saying, ‘Don’t rely upon the things we say,’” he said. “If the marketplace is deceptive, it’s deceptive.” Hoffman noted that state attorneys general have already begun bringing cases against prediction market platforms, and Congress has proposed its own regulations.

“I think it’s incredibly valuable to show how much the markets are providing bad information. What we really need is better regulation—some regulatory solution to this,” he added.

The data behind this story was collected and analyzed by Tory Lysik and Dhrumil Mehta for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and is available to download here. Please direct any inquiries to towcentercuj@gmail.com.

How a Network of Pink-Slime News Sites and Conservative Activists Went After Campus DEI

Using FOIA requests and hidden-camera videos, the groups targeted universities, leading to the firing of faculty and staff.

By Miranda Green

In February of 2025, as college students across the country settled into their spring semesters, administrators at four major public universities in the Midwest received public records requests about their policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, which arrived on the same day from a network of sites that looked like local news outlets, asked for all emails employees had sent the previous year containing the words “BIPOC, Indigenous, Latinx, Diversity, and Non-white.”

The requests, from sites owned by a paid partisan network called Metric Media, were part of a strategic, ongoing effort to expose and castigate public universities for teaching with an eye on diversity. Around the same time, a nonprofit called Accuracy in Media began uploading gotcha-style hidden-camera videos to YouTube of school administrators talking about their continued efforts to foreground diversity and equity. The videos sought to highlight the contrast between those efforts and school rules that, in some cases, ban educators from talking about gender and identity. And last summer, the Oversight Project, an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, sent FOIA requests to the North Carolina public university system, seeking all syllabuses that contained any of a long list of terms, including “gender identity,” “racial equity,” “white privilege,” and “restorative justice.”

An investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found that these efforts were bankrolled in part by donations from conservative philanthropists and foundations that have received funding from the Koch family. Charles Koch and his late brother, David, poured hundreds of millions into nonprofits and libertarian think tanks that promote education reform, among other things. “It is a fundamental attack on how academic ideas are created,” Isaac Kamola, a professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford and the director of the American Association of University Professors’ Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, said. “Those ideas that get produced outside of interference are the ones that the billionaires, the donors, the right-wing political infrastructure are deeply and existentially threatened by.”

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy proposal that has become a lodestar of Trump administration policy, labeled higher education an “establishment captured by woke ‘diversicrats.’” As President Trump has called for an end to “radical and wasteful” government DEI programs, conservative groups have leveraged thousands of public records to publish articles and videos designed to shame institutions, professors, and students. The tactics have led to upheaval across public universities and to faculty terminations, and are part of a broader push to limit what can be taught at institutions of higher education. As of the end of 2025, more than half of college and university students lived in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate. And the use of FOIA requests to extract information about course materials is triggering a widespread reexamination of what is considered a public record and what constitutes academic freedom.

“The sense of a kind of creeping right-wing net, in which they’re going to catch so-called left-wing faculty who are ‘indoctrinating their students,’ is widespread,” Joan Scott, a professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, whose research focused on gender and academic freedom, told Tow. “And it has a chilling effect, which is the point.”

Last July, a national organization requested all syllabuses for seventy-four courses at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that included terms such as “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging,” “queer,” and “sexuality.” The requester was the Oversight Project, whose mission is to “expose and root out corruption in government, among elected officials, and in our most influential organizations.” The group claims to have filed more than a hundred thousand FOIA requests and nearly a hundred lawsuits since its start, in 2022.

“These things being syllabi, they should be transparently posted on the internet without us having to do it, and so we’re really the forcing function for that,” Mike Howell, the president of the Oversight Project, told Tow. “Give it to the people of America so they can see for themselves as to whether schools are still teaching corrosive DEI concepts, and if it’s unlawful in any way.”

Howell has sent dozens of FOIA requests to various government agencies on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and another of its spin-offs, the Daily Signal, a conservative news website. In July, Howell and the Oversight Project sued the Department of Homeland Security in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking public records about the total number of “illegal aliens removed by the Department” and all voluntary departure data.

At UNC Chapel Hill, the Oversight Project’s request suggested that continuing to teach classes whose written materials contained words such as “sexuality,” “queer,” or “intersectionality” was against the law under executive orders Trump issued in the first days of his second term. “Disclosure of these records will contribute significantly to the public’s understanding of university operations and student-facing programming, particularly considering ongoing public concern regarding institutional compliance with current Executive Orders,” Howell wrote in the request. He added that releasing the materials would “shed light on potential inconsistencies between internal practices and public representations made by officials in a matter of substantial national importance.”

Though presidential executive orders are not laws, the UNC system had already directed the sixteen universities it oversees to stop requiring course credits related to DEI. (The system also issued waivers that allowed courses with titles such as “Feminist Theory” and “Social Work Policy and Restorative Justice” to continue being required for some majors.) Professors worried, however, that publicly releasing their syllabuses could lead to targeting by online groups and potential doxing. They started a petition to keep syllabuses private, arguing that publishing course materials “would endanger students and instructors by inviting political actors to attack the free inquiry on our campuses.”

“The FOIA stuff is yet another way of getting faculty into trouble at various universities and creating an atmosphere in which people are then afraid to teach,” Scott said. “The point is to not only go after individuals, as they’re doing in North Carolina right now. The point is to make an example of a few people so that the rest of us will comply.”

In July of 2025, UNC Chapel Hill sided with professors and denied the Oversight Project’s request. “Course materials, including but not limited to exams, lectures, assignments, and syllabi, are the intellectual property of the preparer and are owned by the preparer as nontraditional work,” the university told Inside Higher Education at the time.

Efforts to use federal and state FOIA laws to “expose” university professors and administrators have been underway for decades, according to Zach Greenberg, the director of faculty legal defense at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a nonprofit that works to protect freedom of speech on college campuses. “We’ve seen a lot of this occur in the 2010s targeting professors, usually from advocacy groups on specific issues. For example, you would have oil companies target environmentalists for their scholarly records at universities,” Greenberg said. “Some of it is to figure out what exactly is being taught at these universities, and others are just retaliatory and burdensome because of the nature of their request.”

Recently, though, the requests have grown more personal, Margaret Kwoka, a professor at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and the author of Saving the Freedom of Information Act, said. “One thing we’re starting to see at the state level is a proliferation of what I think are being characterized as abusive or harassing requests that are more politically motivated,” Kwoka told Tow. Deciding what is legitimate and what is burdensome can be tricky, she said: “One person’s view of what is harassing is actually another person’s view of oversight.”

At the same time that North Carolina’s public universities were under pressure to provide class syllabuses, colleges across the country were receiving similar records requests from Metric Media. Metric operates nearly twelve hundred conservative-leaning local news sites, and has posted favorable articles in exchange for payment. In February of 2025, several local news sites owned by Metric sent the simultaneous FOIA requests to administrators at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Illinois, seeking emails and statements that included terms such as “Indigenous” and “Diversity.” But it didn’t end there.

That May, the same month Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, announced the US would “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students, Metric outlets started asking for detailed information about Chinese students and the departments in which they studied. In 2025, they sent at least four hundred and forty-seven records requests to universities from Florida to Alaska, asking universities to explain how they were monitoring students “to safeguard intellectual property and confidential information.” The papers also sought information about students’ ties to the China Scholarship Council. The organization funds Chinese citizens to study abroad in the US, and a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party had been pressuring colleges to cut ties with it.

Then, last summer and fall, according to a Tow analysis of Metric’s requests, Metric news sites sent universities across the US nearly a thousand requests for “course syllabi,” “university board member information,” and “college employee compensation data.” One of Metric’s founders, a former journalist named Brian Timpone, described the records requests as an attempt to hold higher-education institutions accountable. “Parents should know what they are paying professors to teach their children,” he told Sampan, a bilingual Chinese-English newspaper that covers New England, last October. “When a parent has to send their child to a university many states away, rather than the state university for which they are paying, they should know the reason. They should know that hundreds of thousands of spots once reserved for in-state students are now given to foreign nationals who aren’t exceptional at all. It’s a complete outrage.”

Kentucky’s Murray State University was among the schools that received Metric’s requests. Timpone told its student newspaper last September that Metric wanted to find out whether state-funded colleges “are actually teaching, or if they’re trying to propagandize you with nonsense.” Timpone did not respond to Tow’s request for comment.

University responses to Metric’s FOIAs were varied. Murray State, for example, provided Metric with Chinese student admission numbers for the 2024–25 school year, but said it had no records on how many scholarships they received, where the scholarships came from, or policies for monitoring students, the university confirmed to Tow. Southern Illinois University outright denied a request from the Carbondale Reporter, a Metric outlet, to release course syllabuses, stating that Illinois’s records laws exempt “course and research materials used by university faculty.” A University of Connecticut official told Metric that the school couldn’t legally release information about the departments where each student studied because doing so could identify them. But according to a June 27, 2025, response the university shared with Tow, it offered to provide Metric with information about which colleges the students attended. Stephanie Reitz, UConn’s director of media relations, said Metric representatives didn’t respond to the offer.

Blanket requests such as the ones filed by Metric have become easier thanks to software advances and the availability of AI. Between January of 2025 and January of 2026, according to Tow’s analysis, Metric filed more than nine thousand FOIA requests across all fifty states. Timpone has disputed that number, telling Tow: “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” According to the analysis, at least a quarter of those requests—twenty-two hundred and eighty-six—sought records about universities.

The mass filings have strained the agencies and departments charged with responding to requests. The backlog can make it impossible for other requesters, such as journalists and private individuals, to get public records from the same agencies. The Heritage Foundation has boasted about this impact, suggesting that gumming up the system is part of its goal. “Our team has been so effective at flooding government agencies with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that government workers were complaining that ‘the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job,’” the Heritage Foundation wrote in its 2024 annual report. The Heritage Foundation did not respond to a detailed list of questions from Tow.

Mass FOIA filings can be deemed “vexatious,” a legal term that can allow agencies to refuse to answer them. The deluge of record requests has sparked discussion over whether the current FOIA system is broken, but some public records activists worry that any changes would further limit records access for everyone. Instead, they are advocating for new technology. “I think the government needs to do a better job pushing out information,” Kwoka, the Ohio State law professor, said. “And I think there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would make a big difference in how many requests have to be made every year. Some key investments in technology and personnel would make a really big difference, and yet we just haven’t seen the political will to invest in those sorts of system improvements.”

The Oversight Project and Metric Media are just two of at least four groups backed by conservative donors that have targeted university professors over DEI policies and related teaching materials in the past eighteen months. Accuracy in Media, which describes itself as “a nonprofit that uses investigative journalism and cultural activism to expose corruption,” has released dozens of hidden-camera clips of interactions with professors and university staff who appear undeterred by laws or school policies limiting teaching about equity and inclusive philosophies. And the Student Free Press Association, a nonprofit that trains young conservative journalists, produces the College Fix, a news site whose coverage has been shared by right-wing outlets, including the Daily Caller and Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. Together, Metric Media, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association received more than fourteen million dollars for their 2024 operations, according to their most recently released 990 tax filings. That year, the Oversight Project was still part of the Heritage Foundation, which made more than a hundred and thirty million dollars in revenue. The Oversight Project’s 2025 tax filings have not yet been made public.

Metric, Accuracy in Media, and the Student Free Press Association are registered as 501(c)(3) nonprofits, which are forbidden under federal tax law from engaging in election-related political activity. But these groups and the Oversight Project share the same handful of conservative backers, including Donors Trust, which Mother Jones described in 2013 as the “dark-money ATM of the right.” According to the groups’ 2024 tax filings, Donors Trust gave a total of 398,263 dollars to Accuracy in Media and the Student Free Press Association, and 734,673 dollars to the Heritage Foundation, which, at the time, controlled the Oversight Project. Donors Trust had given 1.27 million to Metric Media in 2020.

The Heritage Foundation, which has received more than 1.3 million dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation, was another overlapping donor. In 2024, according to tax filings, it gave a hundred thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association as part of an “Innovation Prize.” In 2024, the Bradley Impact Fund, a donor-advised fund advancing conservative ideas, whose president previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, gave 32,200 dollars to Heritage and forty thousand dollars to the Student Free Press Association. “These people are saying, ‘We don’t like the ideas that are produced through scholarship. We like these other ideas that support our hierarchies, support our version of what the family should be,’” Kamola, the Trinity political science professor and author of Academic Freedom and Dark Money Donors, told Tow.

Kamola said that conservative groups intensified their focus on higher education after the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, when they worried that calls for academic reform would necessitate federal intervention to enforce more equitable hiring practices and possibly even reparations. “If there is an argument that says states have a role in addressing systemic issues, then that’s a problem for those with these radical libertarian beliefs,” he told Tow, adding that, as a result, conservative groups have moved to “delegitimize” colleges and universities. “You create these controversies, so then the school is weak, and you can make it easier for your provocateur to come to campus, or for your Koch-funded academic center [to be built] in the name of viewpoint diversity.”

The power of such groups has grown during Trump’s second term. The author of Project 2025’s section on the Department of Education is Lindsey Burke, the Heritage Foundation’s education policy director. In the document, she argued that the government should stop investing in “the many institutions of higher education that are hostile to free expression, open academic inquiry, and American exceptionalism.” She added: “Enforcement of civil rights should be based on a proper understanding of those laws, rejecting gender ideology and critical race theory.”

Most of the groups that target university professors rely on the internet to spread their message. They often focus on a specific subject that has gained traction online, amplifying one another’s stories and videos through reshares and rewrites. After the death of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk last fall, for example, right-wing activists combed educators’ social media accounts for negative comments about Kirk and posted teachers’ identities in an online “watchlist.” As a result, the American Association of University Professors told Tow that at least forty professors were terminated, suspended, investigated, or otherwise sanctioned.

Scott, the professor emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, said that though targeting academic institutions is not new, “the Trump administration has given them the opportunity to do it with a vengeance.” Greenberg, of FIRE, said the internet mob creates an “outrage machine” that chills free expression by making faculty think twice about what they say—and what they teach.

“Seeing senior colleagues being punished for speaking out, I can see why professors would self-censor accordingly,” Greenberg said. “I don’t think it’s a matter of them having thin skin. I think it’s a matter of institutions lacking the backbone and the principle to defend professors when people call for them to be punished for their expression.”

In 2024, Bethany Letiecq, a professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University, published a research paper about marriage and family dynamics. Conservative outlets the College Fix, the Washington Examiner, and Fox News quickly ran articles and a TV segment blasting Letiecq for criticizing what Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, called the “two-parent married family model.”

The negative coverage sparked death threats, including a phone call Letiecq said she received. (Letiecq reported the call to local police, who issued an arrest warrant for the caller.) George Mason, meanwhile, was about to face a controversy of its own. In June, Glenn Youngkin, who was then the governor of Virginia, appointed Kenneth Marcus to the university’s Board of Visitors, a policymaking and oversight committee. Marcus had previously served in the Trump administration as assistant secretary at the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which, in 2023, had named George Mason as one of dozens of universities under investigation for supposed Civil Rights Act violations related to “discrimination involving shared ancestry.”

When he was appointed to George Mason’s board, Marcus told the Jerusalem News Syndicate, “I’ve been proud to support Governor Youngkin’s recent work combating anti-Semitism here in Virginia, including his leadership in legislation adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.”

Letiecq and two colleagues wrote about Marcus’s political connections in an August 2024 op-ed published in Inside Higher Ed. Later that month, Letiecq was the subject of a blog post published by the nonprofit Defending Education under the headline “George Mason University (CorruptED).” The post targeted a course Letiecq taught and included a copy of her syllabus. According to tax filings, in 2024, Defending Education received nearly a million dollars from Donors Trust and five hundred thousand dollars from the Bradley Impact Fund.

“My syllabi ended up on the Defending Education website. I was like, ‘What is this about?’” Letiecq said. She had never heard of the group, but when Letiecq looked at its tax filings, she found a familiar name: Defending Education’s treasurer was listed as Kenneth Marcus.

“I feel like I was being retaliated against,” Letiecq said. She said she complained to the university. Democrats in the Virginia Senate ultimately blocked Marcus’s appointment to the board. Months later, Defending Education’s president, Nicole Neely, sent FOIA requests to George Mason seeking emails between the university and Letiecq that mentioned Marcus. Letiecq said she has not received notice from the university about whether her correspondence was released. Marcus did not respond to a request for comment.

“Back in the old days, we used to put all of our syllabi up [online] because that could facilitate students’ academic journey,” Letiecq said. Now, she said, doing so makes faculty feel like “sitting ducks and targets of this insanity.”

Educators caught in secretly recorded videos have experienced some of the worst professional consequences. Last spring, Accuracy in Media began posting to its YouTube channel selectively edited videos of university staff and professors talking about navigating DEI bans at their universities.

In “BUSTED: UWF Administrator Exposes Scheme to Evade Florida DEI Ban,” Aurora Osborn, an administrator at the University of West Florida and the director of the school’s Office of Campus Culture and Access, talks about using private funding to pay for diversity initiatives. “State funds cannot be used to be spent on certain programs that promote DEI, but there are other funds involved in running a university, for example donations,” Osborn says in the video.

Accuracy in Media has since posted nearly fifty other gotcha-style video investigations of professors and administrators at universities in states including Ohio, North Carolina, Utah, Texas, Arizona, and Alabama. According to Inside Higher Ed, at least three university employees captured in the films were later removed from their positions. This past June, the Department of Justice announced it was starting a Title VI investigation into diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at Arizona State University following “recent viral videos” that it said showed the school had “denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin.” The DOJ didn’t offer specifics about the videos or link to them, but Accuracy in Media took credit. The organization pointed to a series it posted online that targeted Arizona State University professors and administrators.

Accuracy in Media declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Tow. “Accuracy in Media’s team of talented, dedicated investigative journalists are focused on determining whether highly paid university administrators are adhering to the law,” Adam Guillette, the organization’s president, said in a statement. “No taxpayer should be forced to pay the salaries of lawbreakers. The hateful, radical activism promoted by many of these employees is divisive and antithetical to the founding principles of our nation. We’re always excited when law enforcement agencies at the state or federal levels take action based on our journalism but we rarely communicate with them.”

A similar undercover video recorded inside a Texas A&M classroom last fall targeted Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer in English, who taught a course on children’s literature. The video was recorded during a September session on gender identity and expression, when a student interrupted McCoul’s lecture and said that she wasn’t “entirely sure this is legal to be teaching because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.” The student appeared to be referring to a January 2025 executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism.” She also said that the lecture contradicted her own religious beliefs. The secret recording was amplified on X by Texas state representative Brian Harrison, who helped it go viral and called for McCoul’s firing.

Texas Scorecard, a local outlet run by the nonprofit Citizens News Guild, covered the story extensively. CNG’s chairman is Timothy Dunn, a Texas oil-and-gas magnate who has donated heavily to conservative and family values causes, as well as to Trump’s 2024 reelection campaign.

Ultimately, McCoul, two Texas A&M staff, and the university’s president—a retired four-star Air Force general—would lose their jobs over the video. In February, McCoul sued the school and several administrators for wrongful termination, accusing them of violating her academic freedom. “The subject matter that the student, and then the university, found problematic was germane to her lesson, consistent with the syllabus, the course description and the catalog description,” her lawyer wrote in a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of Texas.

The Texas A&M saga depicted a “worst-case scenario” that is playing out over and over, FIRE’s Greenberg said. “Those groups contact the university or create a big media firestorm calling for the professors to be punished and terminated for their research. And universities do that. They take the bait, they accede to the pressure, they cave to the mob, and they punish their professors.”

Since 2000, nearly seventeen hundred scholars have faced sanctions for their speech. Of that number, according to a FIRE report released last October, about three hundred were terminated or forced to resign. The American Association of University Professors has offered recommendations to schools on how best to respond to FOIA requests. Its primary suggestion is that university legal counsel and faculty should work together to determine what they do and don’t need to release under FOIA law. “It has become really clear that this isn’t just a citizen who is interested in what’s going on in my class, right? These are partisan hacks who want to score political points by misrepresenting what takes place in my class,” Kamola said. “I think the institutions have an obligation to defend their faculty from that partisan interference.”

Universities can push back against requests, but they may be unwilling to engage in legal battles. “A lot of schools are saying, ‘We’re just going to keep our heads down and hope that we don’t get noticed, and we’ll just ride this one out,’” Kamola said. “It’s a bad strategy. It’s a losing strategy.”

Reporting by the Chronicle of Higher Education has found that since 2023, nineteen states have passed laws that prohibit colleges from having DEI offices, ban mandatory diversity training, forbid universities from using diversity statements in hiring or promotion, or block colleges from considering race, sex, ethnicity, or national origin in admissions and employment. A study by PEN America this year found that thirty-eight universities have been proposed for suspension from federal research partnerships over DEI hiring practices. In 2009, Texas became the first state to implement legislation mandating that college syllabuses be shared publicly; since 2024, Utah, Indiana, and Ohio have passed similar laws. University systems in Georgia, Iowa, and Florida have also implemented requirements for syllabuses to be made public.

The Oversight Project is on track to expand its public records campaign. It plans to send FOIA requests to all public universities, seeking any syllabuses that mention DEI policies, as well as university data on their Chinese students, as part of the organization’s “fifty-state solution,” Howell told Tow. He said he couldn’t say how many FOIA responses the organization has received so far, but that it intends to publish them “as soon as practical,” adding: “It’s not imminent. We don’t know what we got yet.” He said the Oversight Project also plans to fundraise for future legal battles. “I think there’s going to be a lot of patriots across the country and foundations that want to support such efforts,” Howell said. “It could be in the tens of millions if all goes well.”

In December, the UNC system announced that instead of rejecting FOIA requests for syllabuses on the basis that they constitute intellectual property, it would now consider syllabuses “directed works,” making them subject to FOIA. It was a total reversal. The president of the UNC system, Peter Hans, said the new policy aims to “promote transparency amid scrutiny.”

A month later, the UNC public records office reopened the Oversight Project’s previously denied request seeking any syllabus that contained DEI-related terms, including “critical race theory” and “microaggressions.” The school notified the relevant professors that their syllabuses were being relinquished.

Inside Restoration News, a Political Nonprofit’s ‘Newsroom’

How a media outlet funded by conservative donors is “waging a permanent campaign to defeat the radical left.”

By C.J. Robinson

Restoration News, which covers topics ranging from abortion to diversity in the military to local school policies, calls itself the news source for the “America First movement.” It is also a line item in a political operation. The site is directly funded by Restoration of America, a right-wing nonprofit that brought in more than seventy-five million dollars in 2024 and spends much of that money on political projects and action committees. Unlike other “pink slime” sites that use AI or automation to produce stories, Restoration News employs human writers who make use of traditional journalistic methods, like Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. But they often fail to meet established journalistic standards. For instance, several subjects of Restoration News stories told the Tow Center they had not been asked for comment before articles about them were published.

A Tow Center investigation analyzed three years of Restoration News coverage, reviewed tax filings and court records connecting the site to the Restoration of America PAC, and traced its distribution through a network of sites run by Metric Media, a pay-for-play, partisan pink-slime network that operates more than a thousand news sites in the United States. What we found is a new kind of right-wing media that is openly funded by political donors, with a distribution network that reaches prominent politicians and the courts.

Restoration News began publishing stories in 2023, mostly authored by Hayden Ludwig, the site’s founder. In response to detailed questions from the Tow Center, Ludwig replied by email, “You’ll find all your answers here,” and linked to a published post under the byline of Dan Curry, Restoration News’s chief strategy officer. “They are attacking us because we are effective,” Curry wrote, defending the site’s content as “well-researched news the corrupt liberal media refuses to cover.” In response to a question about whether Restoration News staff or contributors are bound by any ethical guidelines, Curry called the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics “the most meaningless document ever produced,” adding: “We don’t answer to some empty code. We answer to God, who instructs us via Scripture to tell the truth, expose injustice, and don’t bear false witness.”

Curry went on to criticize the Tow Center and its funding, claiming that Tow “receives millions of dollars from the Left’s top foundations, including the Ford Foundation and billionaire mega-donor George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.” Emily Bell, founding director of the Tow Center, called Restoration News’s statement a “mischaracterization,” and noted that Tow lists its funding sources on its website. “We are consistent and open about our sources of funding,” Bell said. While the Ford and Open Society Foundations “have supported work at the Tow Center in the past, neither is funding projects currently.”

A Politically Funded Newsroom

Doug Truax—who created Restoration of America, in 2015—describes it as the “premier nationwide coordinator of conservative outside groups,” noting that it has raised and spent “well over” a hundred million dollars. Nonprofits are exempt from listing individual donors, but we know that Restoration of America PAC’s main funder is Richard Uihlein, the owner and operator of Uline, the shipping-supply giant, and one of the largest Republican donors in the US. Uihlein has poured millions of dollars into political endeavors, including fake newspapers and election denial campaigns. In 2024, Restoration of America spent two million dollars on Restoration News, according to the nonprofit’s tax records, and contributed almost two million dollars to its own PAC, about half of which is classified as “in kind” contributions. (Federal Election Commission filings show that Restoration of America PAC has spent one hundred and twenty million dollars since 2023 to fund other PACs and political organizations, as well as more than thirty million on opposition to Kamala Harris in 2024.)

Restoration of America’s site offers users the opportunity to give “unlimited” donations to each of its organizations. The main organization is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which allows for participation in political activity like lobbying or campaigning as long as it is not the organization’s “primary activity.”

Restoration of America has extensive connections to Metric Media. The Voter Reference Foundation, another Restoration organization, has published data drawn from voter rolls in an effort to challenge the results of the 2020 election, relying, in part, on a data-mining operation run by Metric founder Brian Timpone. The Restoration of America PAC paid almost two million dollars in 2021 and 2022 to two organizations associated with Metric Media’s stakeholders: Pipeline Advisors and Pipeline Media. Metric’s local news sites often cite Restoration News coverage, and records show that Edward Weinhaus, a lawyer representing Metric Media in several lawsuits related to records requests, also represented Restoration News in at least one FOIA lawsuit in Virginia. In response to a question about Restoration’s connection to Metric Media and Timpone, Curry wrote, “Is Brian Timpone the guy you and other liberal media outlets repeatedly associate with the pejorative, ‘pink slime?’” (Punctuation sic. Timpone spoke to CJR for a story published in February about Metric Media.)

Restoration News sits within a growing class of right-wing media outlets that are explicitly connected to political funding. Similar organizations include The Lion, published by the conservative-Christian Stanley M. Herzog Foundation, and Turning Point USA, which advocates right-wing politics on college campuses and produces news-like products such as a livestreamed talk show, along with a watch list of “radical” professors. The goal of Restoration News is “to cultivate a right-wing interpretation of the world,” A.J. Bauer, a University of Alabama professor who studies far-right media, said.

When it started, three years ago, Restoration News regularly covered national stories on voting records, political influence, abortion, and schools. By 2024, its scope and volume had increased significantly; at its peak, in the run-up to the 2024 election, the site published almost twenty articles a week. Its investigations probe the influence of “dark money” on topics like abortion pills and immigration. It has also created several podcasts, such as Restoration Spotlight, in which Ludwig and Restoration News contributors discuss their work in episodes with titles such as “Stopping the Illegal Alien Crime Wave with Vicky Manning,” and Restoring America—hosted by Grace Reilly, Restoration of America’s media relations manager—which “helps Christians and conservatives understand culture, politics, faith, family, and freedom without losing sight of truth.” The site relies on a growing network of authors who frequently contribute to a slew of right-leaning outlets. Jacob Grandstaff, for instance, is an investigative researcher at Restoration News who has written more than two hundred articles. He has also written for The Federalist, RealClearPolitics, the American Conservative, the American Spectator, and more. Curry wrote that Restoration News chooses “people who are smart, resourceful, non-Leftist ideologues who can think on their feet.”

Chronicling the ‘Woke Left’

Victoria Manning is one of Restoration News’s most prolific authors; only Ludwig has had more bylines. She covers topics ranging from Virginia politics to education and the military. Manning’s Restoration News bio identifies her as a senior investigative researcher who served for eight years as an elected school board member and has a master’s degree in law. In 2022, while she was on the Virginia Beach school board, she made comments suggesting that teaching English to students from South America was “not sustainable,” which, according to the Associated Press, led Virginia’s education secretary to remove Manning from a statewide working group on “innovative education and lab schools.” “Victoria Manning has made a huge difference in her excellent reporting,” Curry wrote in his public response to Tow’s questions, adding that she has “made no secret of her affiliation with the Virginia Beach School Board.” Manning “has held public officials accountable and exposed wrongdoing. Just like a real journalist. Please take notice.” Manning did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Manning’s coverage, like that of other Restoration News contributors, includes the names and faces of her subjects, sometimes pulled from social media and republished without seeking their input or even informing them that a story is coming. She has described some subjects as “extremists,” and others—including teachers, universities, various military officers, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and realtors—as “woke.” In a January story about opposition to a Virginia Beach high school’s Turning Point USA club, Manning wrote: “Even after the violent political assassination of Charlie Kirk, these continued attacks against TPUSA are a continued reminder that leftists don’t care if conservatives die.” (In this case, Manning reported that she sought comment from two people who opposed the club. One told her that “there wasn’t ‘an organization, aside from perhaps the Ku Klux Klan, that is more out of touch with the teachings of Christianity’” than TPUSA, while the other refused to answer her questions and instead “disparaged [Restoration News] as ‘associated with harassment campaigns, intimidation tactics, and political violence.’”) “If we desire a future marked by stability, dignity, and true flourishing for both women and men, the path forward is not found in ideologies that discard timeless truth, but in returning to the wisdom God has already provided,” she wrote in a March piece titled “Marxist Feminists Were the First Supporters of Transgender Ideology.” In 2024, Manning wrote a story about Omekongo Dibinga, a motivational speaker who was hired to speak at an assembly at a school in Virginia Beach. “When Dibinga’s tweets and hateful blog posts were discovered, the community was outraged that he would be speaking to nearly 2,000 students at one of the largest high schools in Virginia,” Manning wrote, citing posts on Dibinga’s Substack that link capitalism to climate change and criticize Donald Trump and other MAGA leaders, as well as a post on X about the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. “Parents spoke up and ultimately the speaking engagement was called off.” Manning did not quote Dibinga in the story, nor did she indicate that she had tried to contact him for comment. Dibinga told the Tow Center he had “no idea” the story had been published. He said the school’s principal blamed school board members for the cancellation. Even though Manning’s Restoration News bio says she served as “an elected school board member,” it does not say that she was on the board in Virginia Beach, where the controversy over Dibinga’s speech occurred; Manning also failed to disclose in the story that she was a board member when Dibinga’s speech was canceled.

Another of Manning’s stories focused on Uwill, an online therapy service that, according to its website, provides services to over four million students in schools and colleges worldwide. In 2025, the Virginia Beach school district contracted with Uwill to offer online counseling to tens of thousands of middle- and high school students. This appears to have outraged Manning, who included names and a social media photo of Uwill therapists who advertise their experience in and openness to working with LGBT kids. Uwill “brags that 25 percent of their counselors identify as LGBTQIA+ and some of their top therapists specialize in sexual identity counseling,” Manning wrote. “Yet they don’t offer support based on a student’s religious beliefs, a central tenet of mental health treatment for many Christians and other faith traditions.” The story makes no reference to attempts by Manning to contact either Uwill or the therapists she mentions by name. (Uwill did not respond to my request for comment.) One therapist named in the story, Jessica Edwards, confirmed she was not contacted by Restoration News prior to publication and said she “found the article to be ridiculous” and “will always advocate and fight for marginalized groups.” The story does include a statement from a school board member concerned about the contract and refers to an unnamed Virginia Beach school employee who attended a required Uwill training and “said it’s just another task added to their plates.”

“Extremists are determined to permanently dismantle the traditional American family. Government schools impose their secular religion and advocate for raising children from ‘cradle to career,’” Manning wrote. “Big government is usurping parental rights and responsibilities—and establishing ownership over your kids.”

In 2025, Manning wrote about a Virginia school board member who failed to comply with a records request from Restoration News. The site, represented by Weinhaus, sued the school board member and won. (The Tow Center previously detailed Metric Media’s attempts to litigate a variety of rejected FOIA requests.)

Restore the Military

Last year, Restoration News started Restore the Military, a website dedicated to outing military personnel who are “more focused on woke politics than on warfighting.” The site contains more than a hundred profiles and photos of “the worst offenders,” sometimes stamped with red “Retired” or “Fired” labels. One Air Force colonel is quoted as saying that “diversity is a strength” and noted to have spoken at a conference called “Celebrating Women Who Have Made Great Achievements.” An Air Force official is said to have participated in a Diversity and Inclusion Working Group and to have organized a Women’s Equality Day, while a Navy rear admiral is referred to as a “mask nazi” for his views on the COVID pandemic.

Restore the Military claims credit for having had a significant impact on its targets’ careers. A banner on the site says the Senate had stopped six senior military officers from being promoted “thanks to the work of the Foundation of the Restoration of America.” The Tow Center found that only one nominee, Air Force colonel George Hall Sebren Jr., was temporarily blocked, in July of 2025, by Indiana Republican senator Jim Banks, who cited concerns about Sebren’s views on diversity. A research paper Sebren published in 2017, in which he argued that the Air Force was “not drawing upon its full talent pool for leadership in its most senior positions,” had been posted on Restore the Military at least a week earlier, according to archived versions of the site. The Senate has since confirmed the promotions of all six officers, including Sebren.

Undercover Journalism?

In 2026, Restoration News began publishing articles by Chelly (C.K.) Bouferrache. Bouferrache, who describes herself as a “blue state dissident,” goes by the handle Honeybadgermom on X, where she posted a video of herself in a face-covering disguise known as black bloc. (In a recent piece about May Day protests in Portland, Bouferrache wrote that she took “precautions with our appearance that journalists covering these crowds have learned are necessary.”) She has also been at the center of altercations with demonstrators. Last October, for instance, an anti-ICE protester sued Bouferrache in Multnomah County Circuit Court after he said she pepper-sprayed him at a demonstration, according to The Oregonian. Bouferrache said she had used the pepper spray in self-defense. She “had a reasonable fear of imminent harm and used a proportional amount of force to protect herself,” attorney Julie Parrish wrote in response to the lawsuit, which is ongoing. Bauer, the University of Alabama professor, said the popularity of figures such as Bouferrache, who has more than sixty thousand followers on X, is akin to the rise of political influencers such as Nick Shirley, the right-wing YouTuber whose independent investigations into Somali-run childcare centers went viral last year. “The barriers to entry are extremely low now for just a random Twitch streamer or video blogger to go out to a protest and get in people’s faces and instigate,” Bauer said. (Restoration News did not directly respond to Tow’s questions about Bouferrache. Bouferrache did not respond to requests for comment.)

In a story for Restoration News about a bombing at the Multnomah Athletic Club in Portland in May, Bouferrache quoted an unnamed source who described the bomber, Bruce Whitman, who was killed in the attack, as a “left-wing anti-capitalist antifa whack job.” (An editor’s note states that “some sources” were not identified “due to fear of retaliation.”) The story suggests that Whitman’s failed efforts to unionize the club, where he worked from 2012 to 2019 as a banquet server and bartender, according to The Oregonian, had triggered the attack. Bouferrache also blames pro-labor city councilors for having been complicit. Whitman’s “political views were consistent with that resentment—a Bernie Sanders supporter whose anti-capitalist worldview put him squarely in the ideological orbit that Portland’s radical Left has spent years cultivating,” Bouferrache wrote. The city councilors “helped build the world these people live in. They cultivated the rage. They legitimized the targets,” she wrote. “They said unions were ‘the compromise,’ leaving the rest unsaid.” The story does not include comments from anyone identified as being related to or even having personally known Whitman, nor does it reference any attempt to contact them. Other local reporting characterized Whitman as a man with severe mental health difficulties who years earlier had filed complaints about sexual harassment and unionization efforts at the club.

“A professional journalist goes out to report on the world as it is, regardless of whatever they find,” Bauer said. “A right-wing reporter will go out into the world looking for things that affirm their priors, or details that might help them in bolstering their case, and then they report on that.”

In its post responding to the Tow Center’s request for comment, Restoration News says it “simply reports on the legitimate stories the Left refuses to cover.” The site’s donors are told something different: “We are waging a Permanent Campaign to defeat the radical Left,” one of the site’s donation pages reads. “YOUR sustained support will ensure victory over Democrats.”

Scraper Factories

How the Tow Center uses AI to collect data from hundreds of websites at once

By Tory Lysik and C.J. Robinson

It can feel more difficult than ever for journalists to find data: FOIA requests go unanswered, government dashboards are taken down, and public databases get quietly archived. In some cases, no datasets exist at all. Increasingly, reporters are left to collect and create their own data.

Systematically collecting data from across the web, a process known as scraping, is a common solution. Writing a scraper or two for a story is (usually) a fairly straightforward task for a data journalist who knows a bit of code. But writing dozens or even hundreds of scrapers to scrape data from multiple websites in myriad formats can be prohibitively time-consuming.

At the Tow Center, we have been able to use AI to generate a first-draft fleet of Python scrapers in just minutes. Now we’re sharing that code for you to use, too.

Scraper Factory is an AI-powered code generator for creating scrapers. Users can enter a list of URLs and generate Python code to collect content like press releases, school board meeting minutes, or news articles. Scraper Factory then generates a checkable artifact in Python, which we review and fix for data and code accuracy before deploying. That code runs on a regular schedule without AI assistance and notifies us if there are errors, ensuring that data is consistently collected over time. In our tests, over three in four scripts that we generated using AI worked successfully without any human intervention.

This code generator has already enabled us to do more. The recent renewed focus on campus investigations has created an unprecedented moment to study how institutions communicate under federal pressure. To capture this, we built a University Communications Database to track public announcements from more than 100 universities—many of them currently under federal investigation.

This project presented exactly the kind of messy, real-world challenge that newsrooms frequently need to handle. During the fall 2025 semester a group of students from the Data Journalism MS program at Columbia Journalism School gathered to use Scraper Factory to create scrapers, test them, and check the resulting Python code for inaccuracies. Those scrapers continue to run today, collecting new communications from universities daily for a single database, which we will publish soon.

The script outputs by Scraper Factory are designed to be modular and reusable. Each contains the same functions, so users can run them at their own cadence. And unlike other AI-powered scraping solutions, running the scrapers requires no continued reliance on LLMs; creation is the only time AI is needed.

Scraper Factory handles communication with an LLM by parsing information about a webpage in a cost-effective way. The underlying code behind webpages can be long and unwieldy, making it difficult for AI to parse in full. The framework coordinates with the LLM to parse only the necessary information, sometimes over multiple calls.

We also ensure each scraper returns consistent data. Sites can change formatting or be taken down, so Scraper Factory notifies us when a scraper fails so that we can fix it—although we plan to use AI tools to automate fixing some of the broken scrapers as well.

By default, Scraper Factory respects robots.txt, meaning that if a website has expressed a desire not to be scraped, ScraperFactory will respect that unless otherwise specified. Multiple court cases have affirmed the legal right to scrape the public web, especially for journalists working in the public interest, but we made this choice so that journalists can be aware of the stated preferences of websites before they scrape, especially if they intend to use other third-party APIs to parse or analyze the data they collect.

Script creation with the models we used for testing averaged $0.08 per scraper, enabling smaller newsrooms to deploy large fleets of scrapers at a relatively low cost. We are also aiming to make Scraper Factory model-agnostic, so as open-source and local models get better, users can substitute their preference into the code.

We demonstrated Scraper Factory at the Computation + Journalism conference in Miami in December 2025, and taught a session on how to use it at NICAR 2026 in Indianapolis in March 2026. We have also made a component of the project available on GitHub, and are planning to make the full set of scraper fleet management tools public soon.

Scraper Factory is a work in progress. We welcome contributors, requests, and questions.

Read the full report here.

In a new book, Muskism, Ben Tarnoff, a technology writer, and Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Boston University, analyze Musk in similar terms, as a maverick businessman who stands for a new type of society and a new social contract. They find that “Muskism” provides a far more dystopian package than Fordism’s offering. It is a world of strict and unforgiving hierarchies where governments exist in symbiotic relationship with Silicon Valley, social welfare erodes, and Musk is a self-appointed “techno-king.” Want safety or stability? Buy a Cybertruck. 

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast, Tarnoff and Slobodian join cohosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss Muskism’s vision of society, where it came from, and what the implications for journalism are. What does Muskism offer the public besides dystopia? How did Musk’s purchase of Twitter fit into his plans? What does journalism free from Muskism look like?

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

What Mapping Charlotte Can Teach Us About Local News

A new report identifies dozens of local news sources, from journalism outlets to church newsletters, to understand what really powers an information ecosystem.

By Sarah Stonbely, PhD

View our interactive of the research here.

When Hurricane Helene battered North Carolina, in September of 2024, communities needed information they could find, trust, and use—fast. They needed to know where to seek shelter, which roads were open, and, eventually, how to navigate complicated insurance and relief systems. They turned to a variety of sources, including local news outlets, as well as communications from schools, libraries, houses of worship, trusted nonprofits, and others.

That crisis exemplified how local news works now, and how trusted channels have changed over the years. I’ve been researching and writing about changes to local news, using Charlotte, North Carolina, as a lens through which to look at the landscape writ large. In a new report, funded by and in partnership with the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, my team and I used a new methodology to gain unprecedented visibility into who is providing vital local news and information, the topics they’re writing about, and the neighborhoods they’re covering—and not covering.

We sought to map the news and information landscape at ground level, to find as many sources of trusted local news and information as we could. We were able to identify sixty-six local news providers, including thirty-two that we called “local journalism originators”—outlets that both employ staff who identify as journalists and perform a watchdog function. The others include church newspapers, sports blogs, and local food newsletters—outlets that might not be included in most mapping studies because they don’t produce “hard news,” but which are important and popular sources of local information nonetheless. We also catalogued 526 Charlotte-serving civil society organizations (CSOs), such as libraries, schools, and houses of worship like the ones residents in the area turned to in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

The advent of AI and advanced computational tools have allowed local news mapping to make giant leaps forward. After we scraped content from more than fifty Charlotte-serving news providers and CSOs, each article was run through an AI system to produce a topic map and a coverage map. The topic map is a visual representation of which topics those organizations are covering; the coverage map identifies locations discussed in the articles. Both allow for comparisons across outlets—for instance, filtering to show only Spanish-language outlets, or only CSOs—and include a longitudinal function to show how coverage changes over time.

The results show a bustling landscape of local news and civic information—a city of Instagram creators, Substack writers, podcasters, Facebook groups, and more. It’s also a place where some neighborhoods—especially those with a higher percentage of Black residents—face a deficit of coverage.

From my research team’s perspective, this opportunity to map the civic information landscape of Charlotte provided proof of concept for a method that aligns with both the current mediascape and the needs of communities and funders. We have striven to be as inclusive as possible of the many voices and viewpoints that constitute Charlotte. Crucially, our funder now has an accurate and actionable road map going forward, one that reflects the range of organizations and community assets that have a part to play in sustaining and building Charlotte’s vibrant civic life.

We’ve also confirmed a notion I suggested early on, that many communities—even those without a local newspaper—might be best described not as news deserts, but as information oceans. This framing reflects the many ways people now share and receive local news and information and acknowledges that they feel awash in unvetted, unverified information. In this framing, journalists can act as lifeboats and beacons, lifting people above rumor, misinformation, and pink slime and pointing them toward fact-based news and information. We believe this approach invites problem-solving among connected systems, while others artificially restrict imagination to market solutions that amplify existing inequities.

With this research we join colleagues elsewhere with similar goals, like Listening Post Collective, who have just concluded research in central Virginia; Journalism + Design Lab, who have thought deeply about the many crucial roles journalists and non-journalists alike play in a healthy communication ecosystem; and the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy, who are working to ensure an equitable and fact-based public sphere in the UK.

Join us May 4th for an in-person lunch presentation and panel at the Columbia Journalism School.

Download full report.

This article was originally published on our Columbia Journalism Review vertical.

This article originally appeared on Columbia Journalism Review March 26, 2026.

Did I Really Say That?

By Emily Bell

Three weeks ago, a Dutch freelancer named Menno van den Bos contacted CJR and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism to tell us he had found a writeup of our Journalism 2050 issue in his country’s press that he suspected of containing AI-generated inaccuracies. In itself this is not surprising. As we have written here before, the incidence of fake quotes and citations from journalists and academics is a growing menace. The Tow Center is frequently cited in error, I and other journalists and researchers are misquoted, and a core citation problem in news that Tow researchers originally identified a year ago is not only not improving, it is generally infecting journalism and academic citation on an increasingly alarming scale.

What was surprising about the incident was that the AI distortions came from a very senior figure in European journalism, Peter Vandermeersch, a former editor in chief at leading Dutch newspaper NRC and chief executive at Mediahuis’s Irish division. Now a kind of intellectual emeritus at Mediahuis, Vandermeersch is an in-house sage, in the official position of a “Journalism and Society fellow.” Or at least he was, until the unchecked and inaccurate use of AI in his work caused his suspension.

Vandermeersch made up quotes from eight different commentators, academics, and journalists from our Journalism 2050 issue. None of the experts appeared anywhere in the project. Their quotes did not exist anywhere else that van den Bos could find. I was one of the quoted commentators, and I do cohost the Journalism 2050 Podcast, but this quote was not something I had said. Not on the podcast, nor, as far as I can tell, anywhere else. Van den Bos’s reporting into Vandermeersch’s Substack uncovered incidents of using AI beyond this one: in total, fifteen out of fifty-three posts contained AI-generated, or otherwise fabricated, quotes.

In a mea culpa, which truth be told could have been a bit more culpa, and a lot more mea, Vandermeersch describes what happened: “Even I—with all my years of experience and knowledge—fell into the trap of hallucinations. I summarised reports using AI tools and worked from those summaries, trusting they were accurate. In doing so, I wrongly put words into people’s mouths, when I should have presented them as paraphrases. In some cases, it reflected my interpretation of their words. That was not just careless—it was wrong.”

There is another problem here—these words could not have been paraphrased because they did not exist. I wasted many minutes of my averagely priced time looking for where I might have said something asinine about “immersive knowledge.” Google AI Overviews pointed me to a speech made by someone else, in which I was quoted, but not about that.

Writing in the Irish Times about the unfortunate case, Fintan O’Toole neatly summarized the embarrassment of his former colleague as boiling down to there being no effective “responsible use of AI” in this type of journalism.

“So what can have come over him?” asks O’Toole. “I suspect the answer lies in his life as a newspaper business executive who can’t help having an eye on the bottom line. That part of his self-described role—‘exploring the responsible use of AI in newsrooms’—is not an abstract intellectual quest. It’s a search for ways to cut more jobs and make higher profits.”

At the heart of this problem lies the original sin of the relationship between platforms and publishers. The haste of publishers to think that, when a technology company presents itself as providing “help” to journalism, this is in fact what it is doing. In nearly every example I can think of, the opposite has been the case. While executives paid far more than editors lectured newsrooms about trust being the “number one problem” for journalism, and shoveled money into underwriting research that “proved” this, their own aim was to borrow the authority of reporting without paying for it, and to create products that washed away the foundations of fact in a tide of cash.

In Paris last week, at the excellent Saving Journalism conference put on by Columbia and McGill University, Julia Angwin talked about the class action case she was filing against Grammarly for appropriating her name and reputation—along with those of dozens of other journalists—to suggest to their users that we were in some way lending our editing skills to their product. In the United Kingdom, another AI authorship scandal broke this week when the new book by Matt Goodwin, a right-wing commentator and would-be politician, appeared to be riddled with made-up “facts” and quotes that didn’t exist; the occasional citation appeared to have ChatGPT left in the URL, pointing to a possible source of the absence of truth.

Sometimes, as a journalist, it is embarrassing or uncomfortable to be held accountable for the things that you said or wrote. Those of us who have been trundling around the hamster wheel of word production, for longer than the internet has existed, now live in a gloam of low-level anxiety that an offhand remark or an aside at a panel will become ingrained in countless AI biographies as the very essence of our intellectual belief system. Attributing values, opinions, actions, and ideas to people who do not hold them has always been a flaw in the worst excesses of journalism. Accountability, although thin and unevenly applied, was at one time a possibility. This too is now largely illusory.

For people who study journalism and track developments in the field, there has been a growing recognition that local news is being created, found, and amplified in ways that would not have been recognizable even a few years ago—the rise of the independent newsfluencer is just the latest example. At the same time, the lens through which we see the journalism field is changing from news-desert deficit to information-ocean overabundance—we are coming to see that, rather than starving for information (even in so-called news deserts), people are awash in it, and journalists are the beacons that point the way toward verified, fact-based content. This more expansive lens shows that in many places—especially in communities without local journalists—there is another category of trusted information source: civil society organizations.

As immigration raids unfolded in Minneapolis, local news outlets like the Star Tribune and Sahan Journal sprang to action, using their networks and established sources to report the story of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in their streets. Reporting has also shown that WhatsApp groups that had been dedicated to figuring out who was providing snacks at the weekend soccer game changed quickly into grassroots organizing channels. At the same time, a vast network of nonprofits, schools, and houses of worship were circulating information via their social media, websites, and newsletters, in many cases providing important supplemental details and more up-to-the-minute reporting on the movements of ICE and the countermovements of the resistance.

In short, the Twin Cities became a live test case for the latest developments in local journalism: a confluence of people-powered communication networks, civil society organizations, independent creator-influencers, and legacy outlets.

To get a sense of how civil society organizations (CSOs) produced, circulated, and amplified local news and information in the Twin Cities during this time, I analyzed the Facebook pages of dozens of nonprofits that operate there, drawing on a list from the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits. Of the 554 CSOs listed as serving the Twin Cities (either Minneapolis or St. Paul), 475 (86 percent) have Facebook pages. I reviewed a sample of the content they posted between December 1, 2025, and February 17, looking for references to the immigration raids, as well as how often organizations posted and whether they amplified content from other organizations.

The CSOs in the Twin Cities took diverse approaches to supplying news and information during this time. I’ve devised three categories with which we might begin to analyze them: megaphone, mentor, and motivator.

The Megaphone: Focus on mission-related messaging

Some CSOs’ Facebook posts during this time period steered entirely, or almost entirely, away from the raids and protests, focusing on organization-relevant content—using the platform like a megaphone for their own activities and programming.

One example of this approach was Big Brothers Big Sisters Twin Cities, a local chapter of a national organization that pairs mentors with underprivileged youth. Between December 1, 2025, and February 17, 2026, they posted 42 times. Three of the 42 posts (7 percent) referred to the immigration raids: one on December 8, which voiced support for the Somali community. The second was on January 8, one day after Renee Good was shot. The post simply included white text on a black background (screenshot below) that stated, in part, “We are deeply saddened by the events that took place in Minneapolis yesterday. Our thoughts are with the community as we process the weight of this together.” In the caption of the post, they included links to other local organizations that provide legal and mental health assistance, including one that publishes in Somali and Spanish.

The third was on February 13, and stated, “When the world feels heavy, the steady presence of a mentor matters more than ever,” and listed ways the organization was showing up for people: “hand-delivering free arts kids and food items,” “moving match events to our building,” and “letter-writing activity to keep littles & bigs connected.” Without ever directly mentioning immigration or the ICE presence, they nevertheless showed their support for the immigrant communities while highlighting the organization’s mission and activities.

The majority of the posts during this period promoted the organization’s activities, including “a Sports Buddies hangout filled with games, laughter, and bonding”; a Big Social + Big Meetup Brunch, and a toy drive. There were also many posts advertising an effort to recruit new mentors, and promoting the CEO’s appearance on local media.

For this category of CSOs, when current events are referenced, the language is apolitical and oblique. They’re showing support for the community but refrain from criticizing specific politicians, policies, or political parties. Their Facebook pages are used primarily for the purpose of promoting their own activities and mission, using their social feed as a megaphone for the organization’s activity.

The Mentor: Acting as a thought leader

Faith-based organizations have long been important interlocutors at the local level. Churches, mosques, and synagogues in the Twin Cities have active Facebook pages and use them to convey news and information about their ongoing daily activities as well as to respond to current events. The messaging of many during this time represents the type of civil society organization that uses social media as a mentor or thought leader.

For example, during the immigration raids, the Facebook page for the House of Hope Presbyterian Church was active, posting 53 times during that two-and-a-half-month period, 19 (36 percent) of which were about the immigration raids. Because this period included the Christmas holiday, many of the posts were about related events and messages. However, the church took a clear anti-ICE position beginning the day Good was shot, posting on January 7, “We grieve alongside our neighbors and acknowledge the sorrow, outrage, and numbness this violence brings. Prayer looks different for each of us, and we encourage you to engage in the practices that feel most supportive right now. Our clergy also invite you to pray with others, in community. Some ways to do that today include…”

Subsequent messages had a similar tone. On January 22, the church wrote, “Scripture speaks ceaselessly against the marginalization and dehumanization of people, especially those most at risk. The prophet Isaiah calls us ‘to loose the bonds of injustice.’ Micah challenges us ‘to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly with God.’ Jesus Christ tells his followers, ‘Just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.’ Every day, we are invited into this faith, this trust in God’s unconditional love.” Reporting during this time documented similar activity by numerous faith leaders across the city.

Posts were clearly in support of immigrants and against the immigration raids, yet they rarely called out President Trump or other administration individuals explicitly. They used their local information channels to both advertise their own activities as well as support resistance activities. Their communications strategy was to act more like a mentor than a megaphone.

The Motivator: Encouraging action and building coalitions

Finally, there were some organizations that engaged deeply and explicitly with the immigration raids and protests, using their social media to repost from other organizations, support their activities, and call for unified action.

One example is an organization called the Alliance, which describes itself as “a coalition of community-based organizations and advocacy groups with a mission to build power across the intersections of geography, race, culture, and issues in the Twin Cities region.” Beginning on December 3, they posted and reposted with explicitly pro-resistance and/or anti-ICE messages. Of 24 total posts during this time, 20 (83 percent) were about resistance to the immigration raids.

For example, the caption for a December 10 post begins, “At the Alliance, we have the honor and privilege of organizing with Somali community leaders and immigrants from across the globe who have chosen to make Minnesota home. We condemn the hateful rhetoric targeting Somali Minnesotans and the ongoing state-sanctioned violence against immigrants, refugees, and US citizens targeted by ICE.” The post goes on to list ways to get involved and provides links to other local organizations that support immigrants and are organizing resistance activities; the accompanying image is an illustration of two women in headscarves with their fists in the air, with the flag of Somalia in the background.

On January 23, the Alliance reposted an article from an organization called Streets.mn, a nonprofit community blog that publishes articles about land use and transportation issues. The article focused on the impacts of the ICE presence on the business districts in Somali and Hispanic parts of town, detailing the closed stores and empty streets and discussing the likely impacts. This act of sharing an article from a niche publication shows how local nonprofits can amplify news content.

Organizations like the Alliance, which are overtly political and proactively create and amplify advocacy content, use their Facebook pages as a way of engaging with like-minded organizations and community members, motivating action and collaboration. In this sense, they act more like a motivator than a megaphone or a mentor.

This quick sketch of civil society organizations’ grassroots communication shows the range of postures they take in their engagement styles. It’s important to note that I did not look at the social media of all 554 CSOs, and that while all of the organizations I looked at were anti-ICE, it’s possible that some supported the immigration raids.

It is increasingly clear that the definition of “what counts” as local news is expanding. New frameworks account for the contribution of ground-level civil society organizations (CSOs) that interact with people nearly every day, often have the community’s trust, and have their own robust means of regular communication with that community. As a participant in a recent listening session hosted by Impact Architects in Vermont stated, “A lot of valuable local knowledge about housing, health, education, even civic opportunities, circulates outside of traditional media. If local outlets could build bridges to those informal networks, information would [be] more inclusive.” The possibilities for collaboration are endless.

Read this article in French in Médianes.

For much of the 2010s, journalism’s crisis was framed as economic. As social media platforms became gatekeepers of revenue and distribution, newsrooms were told to adapt: repair broken business models, build subscription bases. Financial stability was treated as the only prerequisite for independence. If journalism could sustain itself, it would be safe. But now it is clear that economic independence is not enough. Legal pressure—from lawsuits to the threat of litigation—can impose costs that directly affect the financial stability of news organizations, even when their business models appear sustainable.

In the US, the dangers of legal pressure on financial stability became most clear with a lawsuit that led to the collapse of Gawker—bankrolled by Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire. It demonstrated how litigation could be weaponized to dismantle a newsroom, as we talked about on a recent episode of the Journalism 2050 podcast. The case was widely covered in Europe, yet largely treated as an American anomaly.

That “anomaly” now looks structural. In 2024 and 2025, both ABC News and CBS agreed to multimillion-dollar settlements in defamation cases brought by Donald Trump. In the months that followed, both organizations announced layoffs, highlighting how legal disputes can translate into financial consequences for newsrooms and their employees. At the same time, editorial decisions at major outlets such as the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have sparked debate about the growing influence of owners whose broader business interests depend on political and regulatory environments. These developments suggest that even large, well-resourced news organizations are not immune to pressures capable of reshaping editorial independence.

Victor Pickard, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, describes this moment in the United States—one in which journalists such as Don Lemon and Georgia Fort can be arrested while simply doing their jobs—as a “media polycrisis” in a recent essay in the Law and Political Economy Project (LPE). Lawsuits, consolidation, and politicized regulation become “discrete and cascading layers of ‘media capture’ that produce censorship, exclusion, and democratic failure,” he wrote.

The same is happening in Europe, where SLAPPs—strategic lawsuits designed to intimidate and exhaust critics—are increasingly used to burden newsrooms, according to two reports published in February, by Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) and France’s Observatory for Press Freedom Attacks (OFALP). The MFRR report documented 344 legal incidents involving journalists and media outlets across Europe in 2025, including defamation lawsuits and other legal threats that can create significant financial pressure and stress. These cases often target reporting on politically sensitive subjects, from investigations into corruption and corporate interests to coverage of far-right movements, policing, and other forms of political or economic power. In several countries, these pressures are tied to illiberal or far-right movements that contest independent journalism.

In some countries, such as Hungary, which has fallen from 23rd to 68th out of 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index in the past fifteen years, these dynamics are now entrenched. Last month Mertek Media Monitor and the Rule of Law Lab at New York University published a report documenting Viktor Orbán’s government’s systematic efforts to repress independent media, through legal, economic, and administrative tools rather than overt censorship. Today, Orbán’s ruling party, Fidesz, “directly or indirectly controls about 80 percent of the entire media market.” The few independent outlets that remain—including 444, Telex, Átlátszó, and Válasz Online—have increasingly anchored their survival in reader funding as access to state advertising narrowed and ownership consolidated. Several outlets have faced investigations under the 2023 Sovereignty Protection Act: smear campaigns branding them “foreign agents” and repeated defamation suits and alleged violations of data-processing rules.

By looking at France, however, we can see how the tension between legal pressure and financial stability plays out in a country that’s long been considered a democracy-minded environment for journalism. As one French media professional told OFALP, “If we were ordered to pay €15,000 to the opposing party, we would have to shut down. We simply don’t have the financial cushion to pay even half of what they’re asking.” As an analysis by Médianes notes, for outlets operating with limited financial margins, the risk of litigation can quickly become an existential one.

StreetPress, an investigative outlet in France reporting on far-right networks and police violence, has spent more than €100,000 on legal defense in the past two years, and another €75,000 is anticipated in 2026 alone—nearly the equivalent of two reporting positions. The newsroom operates with a €1.5 million budget and has 15,500 donors—an example of a successful reader-funded newsroom. But these legal challenges cut deep.

“Even when we win, we lose money,” Johan Weisz-Myara, the founder of StreetPress, said. Many plaintiffs—public officials in particular—can have their legal costs covered by the public institutions they work for, such as ministries or local governments, a mechanism known in France as “functional protection.” “We are not only defending our reporting,” he added. “We are financing the defense ourselves, while those who sue us often do not bear the cost of initiating proceedings.” Today the team faces eighteen legal challenges, up from roughly ten a few years ago.

Not all cases go to trial. According to Weisz-Myara, three or four out of ten legal challenges are eventually dropped before reaching a final judgment. But the damage is often done long before that point. In many cases, he explained, the plaintiff’s goal is not necessarily to win in court. Instead, legal action can be used to create immediate pressure on a newsroom, forcing journalists to spend time and money defending themselves and sometimes discouraging further reporting before the substance of the accusations is ever addressed.

The pressure extends beyond courtrooms into political institutions. In October of 2025, a parliamentary inquiry was launched into the “neutrality, functioning, and financing” of France’s public broadcaster. As reported by The Guardian, critics have warned of an emerging “era of Trumpism” in which public media are placed under sustained political scrutiny.

To a journalist in the US, with a president who has been openly hostile to the press, these legal threats may seem more minor than they really are. Europe’s polycrisis in its most media-friendly countries, like France, looks different. But it remains a serious warning of things to come. “The problem isn’t unique to StreetPress, and we’re warning that there is a proliferation of abusive legal proceedings against the media and frequent circumvention of the press law in France,” Laure Chauvel, of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.

Independent outlets increasingly call for structured European defense funds to absorb litigation costs. Existing support—including financial and legal assistance from nonprofit organizations such as Media Defence, the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, or France’s Fund for a Free Press—is essential but fragmented and difficult to access at scale; applying often requires time-consuming procedures and an organizational capacity that many smaller newsrooms lack. Cross-border cooperation is also emerging. The European network Sphera, the French StreetPress, and Hungary’s 444 support one another on investigations and exchange practices on managing legal risk. These exchanges matter. But they are not yet a system.

If the 2010s were about repairing revenue models, the 2020s are about defending the conditions of reporting. Economic sustainability remains essential—but resilience is now layered: editorial, economic, legal, and technological. It requires both internal capacity and collective support. Across Europe, independent newsrooms are beginning to build these forms of cooperation, recognizing that safeguarding press freedom now depends as much on solidarity as on sustainability.

Marine Doux is the cofounder and editorial director of Médianes. She is also a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School, where her work focuses on how independent media can reduce platform dependency. In 2024 she co-led the publication of “Créer un média” (Create a Media Outlet), a practical guide for launching independent media outlets.

Disclosure: The author leads Médianes, an independent media outlet, studio, and peer network working with more than 150 media organizations across Europe to strengthen editorial, economic, and technological independence. Médianes has provided marketing, Web, and fundraising support to OFALP (2024), to Reporters Without Borders (since 2021), and to StreetPress (since 2021). StreetPress and 444 are members of Sphera, a European media network coordinated by Médianes since 2024.

Not so fast. 

In this episode of Journalism 2050, we’re joined by two guests who show—in different yet equally promising ways—what the future of journalism can look like. Vanan Murugesan is the executive director of Sahan Journal, a widely acclaimed local news organization in Minneapolis that was set up in 2019 to cover immigrants and people of color. Joshi Herrmann is the founder of Mill Media, which launched in Manchester in 2020 and now provides high-quality local journalism across six different cities in the UK. 

Sahan Journal is one of a growing number of nonprofit news organizations that rely on philanthropic grants. (The Institute for Nonprofit News now counts over four hundred members.) Mill Media’s success is based on subscriptions. Both are thriving, and both provide models that others can follow. What are the risks and rewards of each approach? Have we been too quick to accept that journalism cannot be profitable in the digital age? And what changes when, with rising authoritarianism, the pressures confronting a free press become political as well as economic? 

Suggested Reading:

• “Straight to your inbox: meet the journalists shaking up local UK news,” The Guardian, July 2024

• “Sahan Journal Is Built for When the National Media Leaves,” CJR, December 2025

Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

wo days after the 2024 elections, Metric Media, the online publishing company, started filing thousands of public records requests. Metric, which operates a network of nearly twelve hundred news sites, sent letters to the governments of every city, town, and village in the state of Wisconsin—one thousand, one hundred, and fourteen requests in all. Every one asked for the same thing: a list of voters who had registered on Election Day.

“As a media organization, we are involved in gathering and reporting news to the public. Access to public records is essential for us to fulfill our professional responsibilities, which include holding public institutions accountable and providing transparency to the public,” NE Wisconsin News, a Metric website, wrote. The request also sought a fee waiver typically reserved for press outlets.

But Metric Media is not a traditional news company. Its network, which includes websites with innocuous-sounding names—such as the Chicago City Wire and Ohio’s Buckeye Reporter—has been accused of plagiarism and using fake bylines. The sites are designed to appear legitimate, but they are partisan outlets masquerading as local news—what is sometimes referred to as “pink slime” journalism.

Founded in 2019, Metric has been criticized for jury tampering and tied to pay-for-play political schemes and fake newspapers that land in mailboxes ahead of key elections. Recently, it has focused on obtaining troves of public records. In the past year, an investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found Metric filed more than nine thousand Freedom of Information Act requests across all fifty states.

Many of the requests are for data at the forefront of America’s culture-wars, from allegedly rigged elections to banned books to transgender inmates. With public records in hand, Metric has targeted liberal politicians with negative reporting, criticized the funding of nonprofit organizations, and published personally identifying details about small-town residents who spoke up at school board hearings. Unlike traditional journalism, Metric’s stories do not air dueling perspectives or offer targets a chance to comment.

Brian Timpone, one of the founders of Metric Media, disputed Tow’s FOIA count, saying, “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” He did not respond to a list of detailed questions. Metric’s other founders, Dan Proft and Bradley Cameron, did not respond to requests for comment.

Metric’s strategy fits squarely within a growing effort by conservative think tanks and even the Department of Justice to use public records laws to gain access to voter information and school curricula under the auspices of transparency. “Anybody can file a FOIA request,” Jason R. Baron, a professor of the practice at the University of Maryland’s College of Information, said. “There is nothing in the FOIA law that would differentiate a pay-for-play or some shell-game entity from a more reputable media organization.”

Some critics worry that releasing records such as voter rolls, which can include personal data, amounts to a major breach of privacy and can lead to blatant targeting of individuals. But experts who advocate for stronger FOIA laws worry that placing any limits on requesters could be chilling for all members of the public. “I think quickly this gets you into a very broad, philosophical question about: What do we consider to be news, and what do we not? And who gets to answer that question?” Matt Topic, an Illinois-based FOIA lawyer at Loevy & Loevy, said. “Do we want the government answering that question?”

That’s also the perspective of Edward Weinhaus, a lawyer for Metric and a cofounder of two of its predecessors, which largely operated together: Blockshopper LLC and Journatic, later known as LocalLabs. He says all public records should be fair game. “I do not care what you’re asking for. I do not care what you’re using the information for. If it’s public, it’s yours and it’s all of ours. Let’s go get it,” Weinhaus said in an interview.

Politics Versus Privacy

In January of 2025, Kwame Raoul, the attorney general of Illinois, settled a lawsuit against a Lake Forest, Illinois–based publishing company for illegally posting the birth dates and home addresses of hundreds of thousands of voters. The information was reportedly sourced from the state board of elections and obtained through two registered political action committees. The data included addresses for dozens of state and federal judges, whose places of residence are protected under Illinois law. The organization that published the information was Local Government Information Services (LGIS), which is affiliated with Metric Media.

Metric co-founder Timpone is a former broadcast news reporter with a long history of establishing publishing companies that utilize “proprietary technology to transform public records into news.” LGIS is a collaboration between Timpone and Proft, who ran, unsuccessfully, as a Republican candidate for governor of Illinois in 2009 and later operated a political action committee called People Who Play by the Rules. The PAC received more than forty-two million dollars from Richard Uihlein, the founder of Uline and a major conservative donor. The Illinois attorney general determined that Proft’s PAC had leaked some voter rolls to Metric papers.

It wasn’t the first time Proft had collaborated with candidates. In 2016, the Illinois elections board determined that another of his PACs had paid for fake newspapers filled with political content that had been coordinated with candidates. The PAC was ordered to identify itself in future publications; instead, it stopped funding them.

The latest settlement required Timpone and Proft to destroy any restricted voter data, but did not fine the company or force LGIS to admit to wrongdoing. Nor did it stop Metric, which throughout 2025 requested similar caches of public records and posted some of the results on its websites.

For example, in May and June, Metric papers asked four Illinois counties to release detailed voter records including “each voter’s full name, residential and mailing addresses, voter identification number if applicable, date of birth, phone number and email address if available, party affiliation where relevant, voting history including elections participated in and methods used for voting, as well as their current voter status.”

In January and September, they asked five hundred and seventy-three sheriffs’ departments across fourteen states to release records of arrests, including: “name, sex, race, age, date of birth, and citizenship status of each arrestee.” They also asked for booking photos and names of arresting officers.

In November, various Metric papers sent requests to one hundred and seventy-seven police departments across nine states for information about their police rosters, including name, rank, gender, age, and payroll records.

Because public records are filed by agency and county and there is no unified public records library across states or the country, it’s hard to determine how many of the requests were fulfilled.

Automated FOIAs

LGIS and Metric operate within a network of media companies that frequently change names and websites. Five companies make up the core of the network, according to previous Tow Center research: Metric; LGIS; Pipeline Media; Locality Labs; and Newsinator, which, according to Iowa records, is sometimes called Franklin Archer.

Timpone has been open about the fact that the network uses AI to write stories. “Yes, we use artificial intelligence to produce news. It doesn’t mean it’s some magic. We are collecting source information and just replacing the writing part of the process with software,” he said at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Montreal this past June. “There’s a demand for something new, and free speech is a good thing, period.”

Speaking on a panel called “AI, Truth & Power: Who Controls the Narrative?,” Timpone described Metric as a savior of local news and civic discourse. “Remember those newspapers you used to get at the house when you were a kid that reported on weddings, anniversary parties, the city council and honor roll and the boys who went away to the military? Well, those are gone, and as a result, we have less community. We’re less civil to each other because of it,” Timpone told the crowd. “We have built technology that has built that kind of news.”

The Tow Center found that Metric published more than 1.3 million stories in 2025; by comparison, the Associated Press publishes roughly 459,000 stories a year. Timpone said his goal is to expand Metric’s network to ten thousand websites.

When asked about previous reporting on Metric’s coverage, especially of elections, Timpone blamed the media. “We’ve gotten a lot of criticism, it’s mostly been by other media—they are our competition and they see [us] as a threat, so of course they are trying to find reasons they don’t like it,” he said.

“They have questions about our motives or our funding. Look, the New York Times doesn’t disclose their funding, and they have partisan views of the world,” he continued at the conference. “If you are disagreeing with what we publish, publish something different and make a better argument.”

A Small-Town Paper?

For most of its existence, Metric has leaned on AI and public records as a way to fill its thousands of pages. Its sites contain filler articles on high school sports stats, Sunday church schedules, and local gas prices. Few have bylines, and the ones that do often use fake names.

A large portion of the public records requests filed by Metric papers could be considered fishing—requests that ask for huge amounts of data, such as the emails from every Illinois mayor for the past thirty days. Agencies can reject such requests for being overly broad; they are sometimes outright ignored by record custodians for being “vexatious” under state law.

But in the past year, Metric’s FOIA requests have also focused on the kind of hot-button topics that reinforce conservative talking points and turn school board meetings into screaming matches. Most have also zeroed in on one place: Metric’s home state of Illinois.

Nearly 50 percent of Metric’s FOIAs in 2025 were for information filed in Illinois, according to Tow’s analysis. The requests appear much more detailed and specific than those filed in other states and counties. For example, between January and the beginning of December of 2025, Metric requested the current number of transgender and nonbinary inmates housed at an Illinois corrections center and arrest records from Chicago’s Pride parade. In June, Metric asked for all contracts between the Illinois State Board of Education and the American Institutes for Research, a government contractor that tracks national school performance and that has been accused of wasteful spending by the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Elon Musk.

Metric also filed records requests to every sheriff’s office in Illinois—eighty-four in total—seeking details about county jail inmates with so-called immigration detainers—requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the inmates be released to ICE—issued in the past year. A day later, the Chicago City Wire published a story about Brandon Johnson, the mayor, with the headline: “Mayor Johnson faces heat from two sides over promise to protect illegals from deportation.”

The article quoted Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a right-wing activist group, saying that Johnson “announced himself and his city government to be outlaws on illegal immigration as they plan to help illegal aliens resist the rule of law.” Judicial Watch is known for its own prolific use of FOIA requests and resulting lawsuits to target Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton. It operates with the motto: “Because no one is above the law.” Metric and Judicial Watch share donors, including DonorsTrust, which Mother Jones called the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”

“There is fear because I’m conservative, and I am, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be objective and fair,” Timpone said at the June conference in Montreal. Even so, he added, “it might be true that the conservative voice is heard more, because they are not heard more by the mainstream media in the United States.”

Support in GOP Circles

Metric does not disclose its backers, but its affiliated nonprofit, now called the Community News Foundation, received ten million dollars in donations in 2024. That’s up from six million the previous year, according to the most recently available tax filings.

Companies in Metric’s network took millions during the 2022 election cycle from conservative-leaning PACs, including seven and a half million dollars from two PACs and Restoration of America, a nonprofit backed by Uihlein. Timpone is also described as the founder of the Voter Reference Foundation—an organization run by Doug Truax, a conservative political activist, that uses FOIAs to obtain voter rolls. Metric has run stories derived from VoteRef press releases.

Metric shares donors with conservative think tanks, including the Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation spin-off that calls itself “a nonpartisan independent watchdog” exposing waste and corruption. Both the Community News Foundation and the Oversight Project have received funds from DonorsTrust.

Illinois DOGE

We know about most of Metric’s FOIAs because it writes about them on its websites. The company also posts when it receives public records with noteworthy information. That’s how we know the network targeted a handful of Illinois-based nonprofits last year as part of a series titled “Illinois DOGE.”

The Illinois papers described the DOGE series as profiles of “Illinois ‘non-profit’ organizations that receive all or an overwhelming majority of their funding from government/taxpayers to provide services the state also provides.” It framed the featured organizations as politically liberal and a waste of taxpayer investment. Headlines for profiles in the Chicago City Wire included: “Centro De Trabajadores Unidos gets $4 million to help illegal aliens evade ICE” and “$1.5 million to the Chicago Therapy Collective to advocate for cross-dressing.” Other profile subjects included a nonprofit called TMH Mancave that provides mental health support to Black men; a group called the Indo-American Center that serves South Asian immigrants; and the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Metric copublished the DOGE series with Breakthrough Ideas, a website run by Jeanne Ives, formerly a Republican state representative in Illinois, who describes her site as “a policy advocacy and education network that advances the causes of peace, prosperity, and freedom.”

According to the Prairie State Wire, a Metric paper, members of the Illinois General Assembly’s conservative Illinois Freedom Caucus referred to reporting from the series during a conference this past May, where they discussed unnecessary grants to NGOs and nonprofits and mentioned the Indo-American Center by name.

A Fight in Metric’s Backyard

Timpone owns a home in Oak Brook, a majority-Democratic district about a twenty-minute drive from Chicago. We know this because both Blockshopper and the West Cook News, a Metric site, published his address when he purchased the house, in 2021, for more than 1.6 million dollars. “All my neighbors hate me,” he said at the June panel in Montreal. “They don’t agree with me, and I think that’s also emblematic of how we’ve become less civil as people. If you met me and talked to me, you wouldn’t think I was so bad. But part of the reason that we don’t know our neighbors is because we read this top-down news, this narrative of ‘us versus them.’”

Timpone said that he wants to use his media conglomerate to unite communities across political lines, and that doing so means focusing on local subjects: “What’s pushed to us is this top-down divisiveness, and I’m against that,” he said at the conference. “You don’t have to believe me, but I’m more interested in high school sports than I am in politics at the community level.”

But an analysis of Metric’s coverage of Oak Brook tells a different story. In the past year, two of its papers—the DuPage Policy Journal and Prairie State News—have waded into a fiery war of words over the town’s school board and parks district, at times attacking local parents by name.

Metric papers have zeroed in on a battle over school curricula waged primarily by Kristina McCloy, a former Chicago Bulls cheerleader turned Trump surrogate who was appointed as a Downers Grove Township trustee in 2023, but no longer holds political office. McCloy started Concerned Parents of Hinsdale in 2024 to voice her objections to a book called Julian Is a Mermaid, which she said pushed “woke gender ideology on our children.” That summer, she claimed, in a post to a private Facebook group, that schools were “downplaying” attacks by Black children on white children, including in her school district in Hinsdale, a small village of roughly seventeen thousand residents.

Metric papers have given McCloy and her group a large microphone. They published at least twenty-three articles about her and her group, now called Concerned Parents of Illinois, sometimes quoting McCloy on issues ranging from homelessness to transportation.

Concerned Parents of Illinois has been represented by Judicial Watch—the very same right-wing activist group Metric quoted in its stories chastising Chicago’s mayor and his immigration policies. Judicial Watch received more than ninety-eight million dollars in contributions in 2024, according to its most recent tax filings. It says it spent 13.3 million dollars to monitor and investigate “the actions of federal, state and local government entities and public officials typically using open records laws.” Last year, Metric published at least fourteen stories that mention Judicial Watch by name.

Targeting Local Parents

In September, McCloy said her group had forced the school district to create an “opt out” policy that allows parents to limit their children’s access to certain books, though the district later said her claims were exaggerated.

One local parent who objected to McCloy’s interventions was Will Haskell, a father of three who likened McCloy’s group to “stochastic terrorism” at a consolidated school district hearing in September. A month later, Haskell learned that Judicial Watch had filed public records requests seeking any emails he’d sent to local lawmakers.

Haskell felt targeted, and he said so at the next school district meeting, in October. The following month, the DuPage Policy Journal published an article calling him a “Democratic activist.” The story relied heavily on McCloy, who told the paper: “Will hijacks public meetings in districts he doesn’t even live in, spewing gibberish and resorting to childish name-calling.”

Haskell is a healthcare executive who lives in Hinsdale. He said that he’s far from an activist—he’s only voted in one presidential election in his life. “My kids obviously go to school in District 181, and over the last few years, there have been new attempts to interfere with the school,” Haskell told me. “More than forty parents came out and spoke in opposition to the concerned-parents group and to Kristina McCloy herself, and I was one of them.”

He said he took issue with McCloy’s group insinuating that it was speaking for all parents. “They are only looking to protect the rights of certain parents,” he said. Haskell said McCloy wasn’t at either hearing where he testified. He said friends warned him that speaking up would draw unwanted attention, but it ended up being more than he’d bargained for. “Since then, I have been doxed. My family is receiving threats, my employer is receiving threats,” he said. “Never mind the fact that those articles that you read are from DuPage Policy Journal, which is a pink-slime organization with a history of sending out mailers and other material that are disguised to look like legitimate newspapers, but much of the information contained within them is conjecture. It’s a gross overstatement. It’s just misleading, false information.” McCloy and Judicial Watch did not respond to requests for comment.

The school district did send Judicial Watch responsive emails for its FOIA on Haskell, but they were heavily redacted. A later DuPage Policy Journal article, however, cited and linked to emails Haskell had sent to another local department—the Oak Brook Park District—in which he criticized suggestions that the park district’s facilities should be closed to kids outside the district. “The real issue is that some residents object to paying taxes, while feeling entitled to unrestricted use of public buildings and amenities. They expect others to subsidize their lifestyle, and use the term ‘non-resident’ as a dog whistle for people outside their social class,” he wrote in the published emails.

“Haskell has developed a reputation in DuPage county for political activism and has frequently clashed with conservative residents and officials,” the DuPage Policy Journal article said, linking back to the November article quoting McCloy.

Haskell said Metric never reached out to him for comment; he’s asked them to remove photos of him, which he says they copied from his LinkedIn profile. So far, he said, he’s received no response.

Andrea Flynn was another vocal parent who became the target of a FOIA that sparked online attacks after she wrote a letter to the editor that was published in January of 2025 in The Hinsdalean, a local Illinois paper. She said she wrote the letter after joining the Concerned Parents of Hinsdale Facebook group and seeing their perspective on the LGBTQ+ community.

“I was pretty quickly appalled by a lot of the posts,” Flynn told me. “I got fed up, and I wrote an article.”

“My message to the Concerned Parents of Hinsdale: Please stop. Our young people have enough to manage,” Flynn wrote in the letter. “Business leaders: If you support the Concerned Parents of Hinsdale, I will not support you. And maybe I’ll use the money I save to buy a good ‘gay’ book.”

Two months later, the Prairie State Wire filed a FOIA request to the Village of Hinsdale and its police department seeking all records on Flynn. It’s unclear if it received anything.

Flynn said she was unaware of the FOIA request until I told her about it. After her letter was published, she said, the Concerned Parents of Illinois Facebook page became rife with attacks on her. Many criticized her role as a volunteer for a foundation that raises money for the school district. One suggested FOIAing the police department for any arrest records that named her.

Flynn intended to spark a reaction with the letter. “I wanted them to stop. I felt like the stuff they were saying was really, really mean. Like calling youth ‘tranny boys,’ which I found really offensive,” she said.

But Flynn didn’t expect to be personally attacked for standing up for the school’s curriculum. “I’m just a normal person living my life,” she said. “I’m not trying to be famous.”

C.J. Robinson contributed to this article.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correctly identify Richard Uihlein, Jeanne Ives, and Loevy & Loevy.

Outlier Media now stands as an example of an innovative local media landscape defying the darkest prophecies of journalism’s future. Outlier has pioneered a new journalistic approach—highly interactive, collaborative, responsive, practical, community-focused—to old goals: holding the powerful to account. Its text message system exists alongside original investigative reporting, which is targeted “on issues where better information alone can’t make a difference,” as its site explains. Outlier’s radical mission is journalism that serves not people’s curiosity but their material needs.

In this episode of the Journalism 2050 Podcast, Alvarez and Candice Fortman join Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss community-focused news, how the media landscape has changed over the last decade, and what the future holds. Alvarez is the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication. Fortman is a media consultant who served as Outlier Media’s Executive Editor between 2019 and 2024.

Suggested Reading/Listening:
How Outlier is helping Detroiters get millions of dollars back from Wayne County, Nieman Lab, April 2025

Candice Fortman, Commencement address for the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Class of 2025, May 2025

Civic Guides: How to solve everyday issues in Detroit, influence local decision-making and make the city work for you — written for Detroiters by Detroiters, Outlier Media (series)

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

A growing number of people say they are turning to AI platforms, rather than traditional search engines, for information-related queries.

But while these tools are, in theory, capable of responding to queries about the news in a time-sensitive manner, they may not necessarily be optimized for those tasks.

In a recent test of how several major AI platforms handled questions about a breaking news event – the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by the United States – Wired found that some produced wildly inaccurate answers.

“That didn’t happen,” read the ChatGPT output when it was queried hours after the military raid. “The United States has not invaded Venezuela, and Nicolás Maduro has not been captured.”

Though incorrect, Wired characterized the outputs they received as “expected behavior” for AI platforms, stating that these tools are constrained by the knowledge cutoff dates of the data on which their models were trained. For the version of ChatGPT they used, the knowledge cutoff – the date after which the language model has no new training data to inform its answers – was in September 2024.

But if the knowledge cutoffs were really the limiting factor, the platform responses would consistently reflect outdated information; however, that is not what the Tow Center observed. For example, when we asked ChatGPT the same question on Jan. 5, two days after the US attack on Caracas, it returned the correct answer by searching the web for news that post-dates its knowledge cut-off.

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Because the foundation model is not likely to have been retrained in that short window, this inconsistency suggests a different failure mode: not stale data, but inconsistent decisions about when to activate web search tools.

Every major AI chatbot platform now advertises mechanisms designed to overcome the limitations of static training data. OpenAI’s marketing materials state that “ChatGPT will choose to search the web based on what you ask.” Perplexity promises that “content is sourced from the web in real time,” ensuring users receive the most up-to-date information. Anthropic’s documentation similarly states that its web search tool “gives Claude direct access to real-time web content beyond its knowledge cutoff.”

These AI platforms use systems like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that enable real-time web search or API access to supplement their outputs with up-to-date information.

Although most AI platforms have web search capabilities, searches are not triggered by default for every query. Live search is resource-intensive and increases lag time, so platforms rely on automated routing systems that use various signals based on the prompt and the context in which it was asked to determine when additional tools should be deployed. AI companies do not disclose how exactly this tool routing process works; it likely changes constantly and varies from platform to platform.

For various reasons, the routing process can go wrong, leading to unexpected outputs. For instance, the model might incorrectly infer that pre-trained data would suffice for a question that in fact could only be answered with fresh information.

There might also be other factors that lead to incorrect outputs. Perplexity spokesperson Jesse Dwyer told Wired that its question had been flagged as “likely fraud,” meaning that something about the way in which the question was phrased or the context in which it was asked led the model to dedicate less computational resources to the query, resulting in an answer that could be based on stale data.

This sort of incorrect routing is an inherent problem with agentic pipelines, over and above the well documented issue of model hallucinations.

The language included in some of the inaccurate responses compounds the harm. For instance, according to Wired, Perplexity’s output read, “The premise of your question is not supported by credible reporting or official records: there has been no invasion of Venezuela by the United States that resulted in capturing Nicolás Maduro. In fact, the U.S. has not successfully invaded or apprehended Maduro, and he remains the Venezuelan president as of late 2025. If you’re seeing sensational claims, they likely originate from misinformation or hypothetical scenarios rather than factual events.” [Emphasis is ours.]

Although the answer is technically accurate because it mentions that the information was valid as of late 2025, Perplexity’s response dismisses the premise of the question and implies that the user has been misled. In our view, confidently incorrect outputs such as these risk persuading users that they have been manipulated, further distorting an already muddled information environment. As AI tools are increasingly used for search, these unreliable outputs become more consequential.

Wired’s exhortation to remember that AI platforms are “likely to be stuck in the past” shifts the responsibility to users, who are expected to anticipate that their query might be misdirected or deprioritized based on signals they can’t see or control. But calling these failures “expected behavior” minimizes platform accountability for misleading users. If a company advertises real-time web search as a feature that keeps responses current, failure to activate that feature on a straightforward current-events query is not expected behavior – it’s a product defect.

The Gawker trial was a turning point, both for Thiel personally and for perceptions about the tech industry. His friends would say that, without the Gawker trial, Thiel’s early endorsement of Donald Trump that same year was unthinkable. To others, Thiel’s readiness to simply shut down an online publication that he did not like revealed, perhaps more than any other event up to that point, the authoritarian tendencies of the tech industry and how hollow its commitments to “free information” were. The outlook for digital journalism was ominous.

What are the lessons from the Gawker trial, ten years later? What is its political legacy? And how can digital journalism build a safe future in the face of such severe threats? In this episode of Journalism 2050, Emily Bell is joined by three guests. Maria Bustillos is a journalist, editor, and self-described “information activist” who reported from the courtroom during the Gawker trial. Samuel Earle is the author of Tory Nation: The Dark Legacy of the World’s Most Successful Political Party and a PhD candidate at Columbia Journalism School. Marine Doux is the cofounder and editorial director of Médianes and a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. 

SHOW NOTES:

“Hulk Hogan is the Donald Trump of ‘sports entertainment,’” Maria Bustillos, Popula

Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue, Ryan Holiday

“Editorial Independence Means Technological Independence,” Owen Huchon, CJR

Médianes Studio—A European Partner for Independent Media

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

As Rosen knows as well as anyone, the world did not quite pan out that way. What was initially understood to be a technology of liberation became, increasingly, a mechanism of control: a means of surveilling the public, selling ads, and generating enormous profits for a small number of companies. Journalism and democracy both entered periods of sustained crisis from which they have yet to recover. The internet has even begun to abandon participation as part of its core ethos. As a recent analysis by the Financial Times shows, “social media has become less social”: partly because of these platforms’ algorithms, people are interacting with one another less and returning to the passive media consumption that the internet was supposed to disrupt. In this context, it seems that the people formerly known as the audience are… once again the audience.

In this episode of Journalism 2050, Rosen joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to discuss where it all went wrong and what journalists can do to fight back. Were the assumptions that the internet would help democracy and journalism simply naive? What did commentators fail to see at the time? What should we make of the return to blogging culture via platforms like Substack and Medium? 

Further Reading:

“The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, June 2006

“Have we passed peak social media?” John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, October 2025

“Winter is coming: prospects for the American press under Trump,” Jay Rosen, Press Think, December 2016

Hosts: Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin

Producer: Amanda Darrach

Editor: Emily Russell

Production Coordinator: Hana Joy

Research: Samuel Earle

Art Director: Katie Kosma

Illustrator: Aaron Fernandez

Music: Henry Crooks

In this episode of Journalism 2050, Smith, the cofounder and editor in chief of Semafor, joins Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin to reflect on the thrill of being a journalist in the early years of social media, the internet’s evolution since then, and how AI has become the latest vehicle for techno-evangelism. Even as politics and the tech industry tack right, he insists upon his “core conviction” that good journalism will always find a way to survive.

Should we mourn journalism’s past? How worrying is the future of the news? If Ben Smith was starting out now, would he even be a journalist? Over twenty-five years, as a blogger, editor, and founder—from Politico and BuzzFeed News to the New York Times and, now, Semafor—Smith’s career has always been a revealing indicator of the state of the journalism industry, and where it’s going next.

Further Reading:

• “What Colors Are This Dress?” BuzzFeed, February 26, 2015

• “The Internet of the 2010s Ended Today,” by Charlie Warzel, April 2023, on how BuzzFeed News “defined an era.”

• “The New York Times’ success lays bare the media's disastrous state,” Emily Bell, The Guardian, February 2020

• “Why the Success of the New York Times May Be Bad News for Journalism,” Ben Smith, New York Times, March 2020