AI가 만든 가짜뉴스, AI를 정탐한다

HOME About Fuego --> Encyclo --> Subscribe Archives Foundation Reports Storyboard LATEST STORY Now we're getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production ABOUT SUBSCRIBE Business Models Mobile & Apps Audience & Social Aggregation & Discovery Reporting & Production Encyclo --> Translations Fuego --> July 1, 2026, 4:33 p.m. Now we're getting AI fake news complaining about how AI fake news is the death of real news Did 47 Alabama newspapers die on a single day and no one noticed? (Hint: No, they didn't.) By Joshua Benton @joshuabenton.com July 1, 2026, 4:33 p.m. Tweet Email --> July 1, 2026, 4:33 p.m. Reading sad things about journalism — newspapers, especially — has been a big part of my job for almost two decades. On Monday, I came across such a story that seemed to be getting traction on social media . According to the link aggregator Sill , 18 people I follow on Bluesky had shared a link to it within a few hours. The headline was a grabber: "The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama: How a Media Startup Killed 47 Weekly Newspapers and No One Noticed." It was a site named The Editorial , whose name rang a vague bell for me. I clicked through. The subhead: "Inside the rise and collapse of 1819 News, the right-wing media chain that bought up rural weeklies, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI-generated content." I'd heard of 1819 News , of course, though not for good reasons. The conservative news site, named for Alabama's statehood year, made national news for writing what seemed to many like needless stories exposing a small-town mayor's crossdressing habit ; 48 hours later, the mayor committed suicide. (1819 News' editor-in-chief later said he was " at peace " with the decision to publish.) But I hadn't heard anything about them buying up a bunch of weekly newspapers, so I read on. The story in The Editorial , by Elena Marchetti, was meaty — about 1,900 words — and seemed to feature some good on-the-ground work. It reported that, in 2023, a new company named Alabama Community News LLC spent $3.2 million — money it got from 1819 News — buying up 47 different weekly newspapers in small towns across the state. The goal: to "use the papers’ subscriber lists and advertising relationships to build a statewide conservative media empire." The new corporation immediately centralized operations across all papers, cutting back on staff and turning to AI for stories: By August 2023, [a 26-year-old former campaign staffer named Derek] Haynes was writing or generating approximately 70 percent of the content for all forty-seven papers. The AI produced school board meeting summaries by scraping county government websites; it wrote sports recaps by pulling box scores from the Alabama High School Athletic Association database; it generated obituaries by filtering social media memorial posts. The obituaries were a particular problem. “The AI didn’t know if someone had predeceased relatives or what church they attended,” Haynes says. “We got complaints. A lot of complaints.” Circulation plummeted, advertisers bailed, and promised revenue never came. Within 18 months, Alabama Community News LLC filed for bankruptcy and dissolved, shuttering all 47 newspapers — turning dozens of counties into news deserts. The story had good color from several of the counties, showing some real-world impacts of these closures. The writing gets a little purple in places, but in ways I could imagine for a talented young reporter writing their first big feature. This was a big deal — 47 towns losing their newspapers! Was it really possible that no one outside Alabama had noticed, journalistically speaking? AL.com is an above-average local news operation — did they not cover this, or did it just not escape containment? I follow a healthy number of Deep South journalists on social media — did my East Coast blinders keep me from spotting it? I started googling around, and it didn't take long to figure out that I hadn't missed anything. I checked on several of the allegedly dead newspapers — the St. Clair News-Aegis , the Clarke County Democrat , the Greene County Democrat , the Centreville Press — and they all seemed to be operational, still publishing regular content. An upset advertiser, Tolliver Chevrolet in Clanton, didn't seem to exist. Neither did dedicated reader Dr. Thomasina Reed, who had "lived in Greensboro, Alabama, population 2,300, for forty-two years" and was "the only physician at the Hale County Rural Health Clinic," which also doesn't exist. Alabama Community News LLC is not a real corporation, and 1819 News never funded any roll-up of Alabama weeklies. It's all fake. I wasn't the only one confused. "I've worked here since 2022, and we are very much alive, still do print and are growing," Noah Wortham, managing editor of the Shelby County Reporter , told me. His paper is one of the weeklies The Editorial had marked for death; in reality, it's been owned by Boone Newsmedia for many years. "Looks like the AI alligator is consuming or manufacturing fake news," said Thomas Michael Hobson, editor of the Centreville Press . According to Rob Holbert , co-publisher of the Mobile weekly Lagniappe , the story was all the buzz in Alabama journalism circles: "The messages started coming in hot and heavy late Sunday night from people I know and respect." By Tuesday, the story had been taken down. First, it returned an "Article not found" error, but by the end of the day, that was replaced with a more detailed message: The Editorial removed this article on June 30, 2026. Reason: Removed for fact-verification concerns — fabricated specifics not supported by sources.. [sic] We retract content when it fails our verification standards. See our methodology and corrections policies. (Luckily, the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine recorded a copy of it before the takedown. One more reason to love the Internet Archive . Here's a screenshot , too.) Fake news isn't new, obviously. And while AI-generated slop is newer, it's hardly unfamiliar at this point. But why would a spam site bother making up a story about Alabama weekly newspapers, of all things? Whose interest is it in to get that niche? Not the first offense It turns out that The Editorial was vaguely familiar to me because a local reporter up here in Boston, Heidi Legg , runs an unrelated site named The Editorial , which features her interviews with area artists, scientists, scholars, and such. Heidi's site is real and at theeditorial. com ; the Alabama story was at theeditorial. news . They don't have anything to do with each other. Looking into The Editorial — the fake one — I noticed that this Alabama piece wasn't the first time it had written made-up stories about local American newspapers in crisis. In fact, it seems to be a thriving little subgenre for the site. The 627 Empty Desks: How Texas Killed Its Weekly Newspapers and the Truth Went With Them Across the 254 counties of Texas, the collapse of local journalism has created information vacuums that oligarchs, cartels, and politicians are filling. Nashville Tennessean, 1812–2026: Inside the Newsroom That Voted to Close Itself Gannett offered severance or one year at half salary. The staff chose neither. They asked to shut the paper and walked out together. The Last Press Run: Why America Loses a Newspaper Every Week and No One Cares Newspapers are dying at a rate of one per week. In Danville, Illinois, the final edition of the Commercial-News went to press on a Friday in May. The story of how it happened — and what it means. Those first two were taken down by The Editorial when the Alabama story came down. The third is still online, somehow. (In reality, the Nashville Tennessean and Danville Commercial-News are still around.) ( Update : Shortly after this piece was published, The Editorial took down that third piece. Here it is in Wayback . Also, hi Fran