Last fall I had a post about the phenomenon known as “pink slime” journalism. Basically it’s where websites churn out content using either low-paid writers or generative AI. The “news” is either low-quality scrapings from legitimate sites or paid political propaganda. With the continued rise of AI, more and more sites are producing pink slime content to generate advertising revenue. The following is an update I added to the main post on pink slime.
Pink slime journalism sites have not gone away in the months since I first wrote about them. In fact, AI-powered pink slime sites continue to grow, infesting people’s news diet. (If you need a refresher, “pink slime,” in addition to being used to describe “finely chopped beef” trimmings, has more recently been used to describe automated websites that publish poor-quality news stories and political propaganda while pretending to be high-quality local news sites.)
Nieman Lab ran a big story in January of 2025 about a network of AI-generated newsletters that operate as Good Day News. The AI-engine scans everything it can find about the community and turns it into brief, positive stories. In essence, Good Day takes the work done by local newspapers, radio stations, TV stations, and independent digital outlets It then repackages the information and sells advertising to go with it.
The newsletters have testimonials that go with them. Local news publishers say the endorsements are fabricated. The publisher of the newsletters denies this, saying the names “anonymized” and the quotes “sanitized amalgamations of some of our favorite (and most common) testimonials.”
(Hmmm… I know what I would say to a student who made those statements.)
I highly recommend reading Andrew Deck’s story and would argue that this is a perfect example of pink slime journalism, even though Deck does not use the term.
Have you encountered pink slime sites? Leave a comment below!