As ‘pink slime’ aims to fill local news vacuum, is anyone reading?

A Stanford study finds little consumption of politically driven, faux local-news sites

It sounds like an alarming equation: While local news outlets shutter and news deserts expand nationwide, so-called “pink slime” sites are filling the void with political propaganda disguised as legitimate news. For anyone who believes democracy is built on a foundation of truth, this is a disturbing trend.

But most of the attention on pink-slime journalism has focused on its production, such as the “1,300 community news sites” that Metric Media, Chicago businessman Brian Timpone’s company that pushes Republican candidates and far-right talking points, touts operating across the country. A new Stanford University study looks for the first time at the other side of this equation: consumer usage of these sites.

Its key finding: Pink-slime outlets have not altered the journalism world or our democracy —at least not yet.

“Overall, our analysis reveals that pink slime exposure is relatively rare, and even among those exposed, is consumed very little,” authors Ryan C. Moore, Ross Dahlke, Priyanjana Bengani and Jeffrey T. Hancock write in “The Consumption of Pink Slime Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, and Why?” The study also notes: “Despite ample speculation, we find no relationship between living in news deserts and being exposed to pink slime.”

Dahlke said the study is in its pre-print phase, and the final, published paper is subject to change as it undergoes peer review.

Analyzing web-browsing data collected from American adults in the months surrounding the 2020 election, the Stanford researchers found that “just 3.7% of Americans were exposed to pink slime…and exposure among those exposed was limited.” Those figures lie in stark contrast to the 39.1% of people exposed to known misinformation websites and 36.4% exposed to local news websites.

The study also notes that although past research has shown that Trump supporters, and older, more conservative white adults are the most likely consumers of online misinformation, those demographic patterns do not apply to pink slime. The latter outlets were visited more frequently by people under the age of 30 and Biden supporters, albeit in such relatively small numbers that the researchers conclude: “We find no clear relationship between the ideological slant of people’s online media diets and their exposure to pink slime.”

“Whatever pink slime was trying to do, they weren’t very successful at it,” Dahlke said in a joint call with Moore, both PhD candidates in Stanford’s Communication Department. “Whether it was a business venture, a political venture, a data-collection effort, they just weren’t very successful.”

Nikki Usher, a University of San Diego communication studies associate professor, was not surprised that these faux news sites have failed to catch on with the general population. “People are not dumb,” Usher said. “They can make assessments about media bias. We do it all the time.”

The pink-slime sites cover an array of topics meant to give the impression of providing useful community news—and perhaps to boost search engine optimization (SEO)—but the Stanford study found that few readers engage with the numerous pieces about, say, gas and iron prices or professional licensing information. “Nobody read any of those stories in our data, even though it was well over half of the entire stories that the pink outlets generated,” Moore said.

Then again, given these sites’ partisan agendas, the stories intended to attract the most attention are the political ones. Yet, Dahlke said, even those numbers don’t compare to the hundreds or thousands of site visits made by someone pursuing, for example, QAnon misinformation. “The person that consumed the most pink slime in our dataset consumed 10 articles,” Dahlke said. “So even the person who was the deepest in pink slime probably had one browsing session where they clicked around on the website and never went back.”

Penny Muse Abernathy, primary author of the Medill Local News Initiative’s report “The State of Local News 2022,” argued that these sites aren’t built for steady readership. “The question is not how many stories they post or how many people visit their websites,” said Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. “The whole goal of these sites is to post something that is so provocative or so divisive that it gets picked up on social media. It’s an algorithm play.”

That happened last May when Metric’s West Cook News, which purports to cover Chicago’s near western suburbs, reported falsely that Oak Park and River Forest High School was implementing a race-based grading system to force teachers “to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.” Despite the school’s denials, the story went viral on social media and among national conservative outlets, and the West Cook News continued to run pieces giving then-Illinois Republican governor candidate Darren Bailey a platform to decry the school’s “‘woke’ ideology.”

Still, Usher noted, such examples are the exception, not the rule, as the chances of any story going viral remain slim. “They’re as few and far between as any other viral local story,” they said.

Philip Napoli, a Duke University public policy professor and author of the 2019 book “Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age,” credited the Stanford study for being “the first one to try to rigorously get at the audience side: Is anyone really reading this stuff?”

Its findings, Napoli said, support what he has learned in his own research. “All the indicators are, at least at this point in time, that their audiences are pretty small,” he said. “We also saw, though, that what these sites do is lie kind of dormant until particularly political moments arise, and then they can spring to life and produce a lot more content.”

He noted that the sites’ impact may not be measurable in clicks given that a story’s purpose may be more about “getting a particular idea or theory into the ecosystem” so it can become a national talking point. “With any kind of media these days, the actual number of eyeballs on the actual site is just the starting point in terms of trying to get a sense of what the real reach and influence is.”

Tim Franklin, the senior associate dean and John M. Mutz Chair in Local News at Medill, agreed with Napoli about the relative importance of website visits. Still, he said the Stanford study is significant because it tells us for the first time that even with the explosion in the number of pink-slime sites, there’s not much of an audience. Because of that, he said it will be interesting to see whether the purveyors of these sites replicate their efforts in next year’s election.

“There are all kinds of nefarious ways to spread misinformation and propaganda short of creating a faux local news site or physical newspaper,” said Franklin, who also directs the Medill Local News Initiative. “Based on this study, it appears operating fake local news sites may be a bad idea for building audience and a[TF1]  bad investment.”

A NewsGuard study at the end of last year tallied 1,202 pink slime sites, “slightly less than the 1,230 daily newspapers left operating in the U.S.” Metric self-reports a higher number of its own outlets on its website.

Moore and Dahlke said they’d like to incorporate more recent data into their continued work on this topic. For the 2020 election they studied only websites, yet during the 2022 election cycle, Metric Media was mailing physical copies of its publications to people’s homes. “That was a more recent development,” Moore said, noting that perhaps this strategy shift was logical “because they aren’t having as much success as they’d like to online.”

Usher was dubious that the medium delivering the message would be a game changer. “Trust in news is so low that I’m not sure a mailer that looks like a newspaper vs. a mailer that looks like a mailer is going to make much difference,” they said.

Anna Brugmann, policy director for the nonprofit organization Rebuild Local News, cited a recent Knight Foundation poll indicating that local news sources are far more trusted than national news sources, so she said it’s not surprising that these are the templates being imitated by the pink-slime purveyors. “They’re mimicking local news, because I think folks are implicitly aware that somebody is more likely to trust something that looks like their hometown paper than something that looks just like national information.”

Napoli agreed that using a print product makes sense given that older readers prefer physical newspapers, and “it is the elderly voters who are more susceptible to disinformation, and they tend to lean conservative.” He speculated that the mailing of fake newspapers might draw the attention of the Federal Election Commission as it distinguishes between political and news organizations.

Usher argued that the “pink slime” label should be discarded. “I think we should just call these sites what they are, which are Republican-backed local news sites that are strategic political communication,” they said.

Dahlke and Moore said although most of the sites studied push right-wing causes, the paper also includes data from networks such as Courier Newsroom, which is upfront in its aim to become “the largest left-leaning local news network in the country.”

Dahlke said the researchers also looked at how close readers lived to the sources of this local news and political content. The answer was that neither was all that local. “The average pink slime article was about 500 miles from where people were living, and the local news was about 600 miles but not significantly different,” Dahlke said. “So local news is not even really reaching people in our data set.”

This point speaks to Usher’s larger concern about the state of local news—and feeling that if the propaganda sites do find a way to reach readers, the legitimate local outlets might want to take note. “Maybe we ought to figure out what they’re doing and seeing what we can learn,” Usher said, “because capturing attention for local news is really hard.”

Dahlke said that of the “Who, What, When, Where, and Why?” of the paper’s title, he thinks the researchers answer all but the last one. “Why are these outlets doing it?” Dahlke asked. “Coming in we thought we might be able to pretty well discern what their motivations were, and we’re almost left with more questions than answers on that front.”

Metric Media did not respond to a request for comment.

Napoli has more questions as well: “What is their revenue model? What is their strategic plan? It costs so little to percolate these things the way they do, but they don’t seem to be making a lot of effort to grow their audience.”

Still, he said, such propaganda efforts are adding to collective damage being done to the news industry’s credibility.  “We’re watching this death by a thousand cuts of legitimate, trustworthy journalism,” Napoli said.

And the next presidential election is less than 20 months away.

About the author

Mark Caro

Editor

Caro is an author (The Foie Gras Wars, The Special Counsel: The Mueller Report Retold) and former longtime Chicago Tribune culture reporter, columnist and critic. He talks with prominent creative people on his weekly Caropop podcast and writes for Chicago magazine and other outlets. He was a journalism Cherub at Northwestern’s National High School Institute a long time ago.

Latest Posts