The local news sites paid for by political money

As local papers closed, a different kind of local site spread. The masthead carries a city name. The copy covers schools and councils. The money behind it is political, and the political purpose is easy to miss on the page. Researchers call the product pink slime.

On the right, the largest network is Metric Media and the entities around it, associated with Brian Timpone. It has operated hundreds of sites. The Tow Center for Digital Journalism and others have traced part of the funding to conservative donors and political committees, including entities linked to Richard Uihlein. Much of the copy is thin, or built from public data. The sites rarely put the backing in front of the reader. Timpone has said the point includes getting campus material, which he calls anti-American, out of taxpayer-funded universities. A September 2026 story in The Appalachian described one Metric site, the High Country Times, filing public-records requests at Appalachian State for pay data, trustee records, and syllabi. The name sits next to the real local paper, High Country Press.

On the left, Courier Newsroom is the counterpart that reporting has treated as the clearest match. Tara McGowan, a Democratic strategist, founded it. The sites use local brands in swing states. Seed money and later support have been linked, in that reporting, to Reid Hoffman and to groups connected to George Soros, along with other progressive donors and political committees. The sites describe themselves as an answer to news deserts. The coverage has lined up with Democratic campaigns, and the network has bought targeted digital ads.

Columbia Journalism Review, NewsGuard, Semafor, and academic researchers have mapped both networks, the funders, and the advertising. A reader who finds a story about a school board or a local candidate on one of these sites is looking at political money in a local frame.

Who pays whom in this reportopen the full map →