Inside the rise of New England ‘pink slime’ news outlets: ‘My worst fear is someone looks at this and thinks it’s real’

The number of pink slime websites has exploded nationwide in recent years, including at least 60 in New England, according to NewsGuard, which analyzes the reliability of news organizations and works to combat misinformation. Many focus their efforts on hot-button political issues, with some taking a liberal bent and others conservative; one of the largest, the publisher of West Cook News, has links to right-wing political networks.

As their numbers swell, and advancements in artificial intelligence grow, the outlets, paid for by publishers to appear in social media feeds with a veneer of credibility, could pose a threat by undermining legitimate information.

“There is a risk of these websites not only increasing in size . . . but also there is a chance that they may receive more and more engagement,” said Chiara Vercellone, a senior staff analyst at NewsGuard.

The sites themselves draw little traffic — likely due at least in part to their poor quality and absence of detailed local news coverage. But their operators have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on social media advertising to get their headlines in front of readers.

Priyanjana Bengani, at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said Metric Media outlets — which include West Cook News — spent $450,000 to $1.2 million on Facebook ads from 2021 through 2022.

Meanwhile, traditional local news outlets are closing at a rapid clip. The United States has lost one-quarter of its newspapers over the past 20 years as outlets ranging from local public radio stations to international digital newsrooms face financial challenges. There were 1,213 daily local newspapers in the United States last year, making it likely that pink slime sites will outnumber them soon, if they don’t already.

“A lot of these sites are filling the vacuum where real local news used to be,” Vercellone said.

Metric Media is one of the largest operators of pink slime sites. Its publications in Massachusetts include the North Boston News, Metro West Times, Cape Cod Ledger, and Bean Town Times. In Rhode Island, it operates Ocean State Today, Providence Reporter, and Rhode Island Business Daily, among others. It has 10 publications in New Hampshire, where readers are often targeted for political content, including the Concord Ledger, Granite State Times, and New Hampshire Business Daily.

Most stories do not have bylines attributed to individual journalists and are often about where the state or county ranks on a list, or are built around a quote from a public official. But others veer into the political.

Two sites in New England, for example, published pieces about Wellesley College and Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire continuing “to mandate the ‘COVID’ mRNA injection,” quoting a doctor saying the COVID vaccine is “not a vaccine” and falsely claiming the vaccines are “not keeping you from getting sick.”

Sites focused on New Hampshire often draw the highest engagement in New England, Vercellone said, likely due to its politically polarized population. That makes it a prime target for pink slime sites on both the left and the right to try and influence potential voters.

One such site is Strafford News, a Metric Media website that purports to cover Strafford County. In June, its home page included five stories about local gas prices and a story about the percentage of students in Strafford County who played college sports in 2022.

Michael Harrington, a Republican New Hampshire state representative who represents towns in the county, said he hadn’t heard of Strafford News until alerted to it by the Globe.

“My worst fear is someone looks at this and thinks it’s real,” Harrington said. His local paper has shrunk and no longer covers the area’s communities the way it used to, he said.

Another Metric Media site is North Boston News, whose home page in June featured articles on the cheapest diesel in Essex County, how Massachusetts’ congressional delegation voted on a digital currency bill, and what percentage of Suffolk County residents were unemployed in 2021.

“It just seemed like a bizarre amalgamation of irrelevant press releases the last time I looked at it,” said Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy.

Some articles stand out for leaning into conservative talking points, such as billionaire philanthropist George Soros, and/or questioning the efficacy of COVID vaccines. Another North Boston News missive repurposed a New York Post article under the headline, “Report: Jewish left-wing activist Soros funding tent city at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” but failed to show that Soros directly bankrolled the pro-Palestinian protests at MIT.

“This seems to be they’re really weaponizing [the site],” Kennedy said of the Soros article.

On its websites, Metric Media claims “to fill the void in community news” with “objective, data-driven information without political bias” and 100 percent original reporting.

But studies from the Tow Center said Metric Media and related entities have a network of more than 1,200 sites and have received funding from DonorsTrust and the National Christian Charitable Foundation according to the Tow report. The Tow Center said Metric Media coordinated with advocacy groups on topics to cover, which The New York Times in a separate investigation called “pay-for-play.”

A key figure behind Metric Media is Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman and former television journalist, according to the Tow report, NewsGuard, and the Times. Timpone is a manager of both Pipeline Media LLC and Pipeline Advisors LLC, both of which are the top contractors to Metric Media, according to its 2022 tax filing.

Timpone declined an interview request, saying, “Write whatever you want. We don’t care.”

Other such networks include Local Report, which both NewsGuard and the Tow Center say has ties to Democratic operatives and funding from partisan groups. Local Report did not respond to requests for comment.

Local Report sites include The Seacoast Standard and The Amoskeag Times, which publish content about New Hampshire. Recent headlines included: “U.S. Consumer Confidence on the Rise” and “NH House reaffirms support for transgender ‘bathroom bill.’ ”

Another website, The Boston Times, is a fake news outlet reported to have been built by John Mark Dougan, an American who claimed political asylum in Russia, according to The New York Times and NewsGuard. The site falsely claims to have won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting, feature writing, and photography.

In early June, its home page lacked a single story about Boston, focusing on pro-Donald Trump stories. Among its coverage of the Ukraine war is a piece accusing Ukraine of forcing people into slavery and “forced fertilization.” Its main source for that information was the “Foundation to Battle Injustice,” which the Treasury Department has identified as belonging to a Russian oligarch.

In text messages, Dougan denied he operated the Boston Times, but believed its articles to be “credible” and “honest.” He added he is “just a security hardware designer.”

So far, pink slime sites get few readers, a recent Stanford preprint study found. The study found 3.7 percent of Americans encountered pink slime during the 2020 election, compared to 36 percent who visited local news websites. But the sites can contribute to a “surround sound effect,” when the same idea appears across different platforms, leading someone to take it as fact, Bengani said.

Pink slime networks are less effective than Fox News and social media at influencing people, said Kennedy, but they’re still concerning for their potential to spread misinformation.

“It’s just one more thing,” he said. “And it is taking advantage of the lack of reliable local news in many communities.”

Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.