A national network of seemingly local AI-generated newsletters that came under scrutiny from a national media outlet includes at least two in Colorado.
Andrew Deck, who covers generative AI for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, broke the news on Jan. 27. The headline: “Inside a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting ‘small town America.’”
In the story, the reporter reveals that a man based in New York City is using artificial intelligence tools to run a swarm of local-sounding bot newsletters.
Two of them, Good Day Fort Collins and Good Day Pueblo, are in cities that bookend Colorado’s Front Range.
From the story:
It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”
You wouldn’t know any of that as a subscriber. Separate website domains and distinct newsletter names make it difficult to connect the dots. There is Good Day Rock Springs, Daily Bentonville, Today in Virginia Beach, and Pittsburgh Morning News, to name just a few. Nothing in the newsletter copy discloses that they are part of a national network or that the article curation and summary blurbs are generated using large language models (LLMs).
In an email, Deck said he chose to lead his story with the Fort Collins newsletter because he wanted it to feel grounded somewhere.
“For whatever reason the readership in Fort Collins appeared to be larger, or at least more engaged,” he told me.
The development is another indication of how easy it has become to employ artificial intelligence to create local-seeming news sites from faraway places.
And it shows the importance of doing our own due diligence when coming across an unfamiliar site, a newsletter in our inbox, a new social media account, or piece of content that we might assume is locally produced. Especially if we’re thinking about paying for it.
To that end, the author of the well-reported Nieman Lab story got ahold of the man behind this new suite of aggregation AI newsletters. Doing so took making a $5 reader donation to Good Day Fort Collins, tracing the charge back to a web domain, and figuring out who owned it.
Deck wrote that he was surprised that the operator, a man named Matthew Henderson, was willing to talk when he reached out via email.
“Our goal is to use automation and technology everywhere we possibly can without sacrificing product quality for our readers,” Henderson, a serial internet startup founder, told Deck in an email, adding that he created the technology he uses to send out a flurry of newsletters each day.
His Good Daily newsletters are not providing original reporting, Deck wrote.
Instead, “automated agents” scour the local news in cities and towns, identify relevant stories, “summarize them, edit and approve the copy, format it into a newsletter, and publish,” Deck wrote about the process.
The New York City man behind Good Day Fort Collins and Good Day Pueblo told the reporter he sees his role as actually benefiting local news publishers by sending traffic and eyeballs to their work.
That didn’t sit right with Rodney Gibbs, the head of audience and product at the National Trust for Local News. “His claim is, frankly, horseshit,” Gibbs told Deck for the Nieman Lab piece.
The National Trust owns more than 60 local newspapers in three states, including the two-dozen nonprofit Colorado Community Media papers in the Denver suburbs. Good Daily newsletters “regularly” aggregate their content, Deck wrote.
Here’s more from the story:
Gibbs points out that, in order to operate, AI newsletters rely on human labor at existing local news publishers. Generally, I found, Good Daily links to the handful of operating newsrooms in any given town, including legacy daily newspapers, radio stations, and independent digital outlets. Websites for local news broadcasters were the most common source. In each case, Good Daily could compete with these outlets for local advertising.
And more:
Good Daily makes money from its newsletters in a few ways. For one, readers can contribute to the newsletters directly. A reader donation page offers $5/month and $50/year tiers, with a promised birthday shout out for contributors (though it’s worth noting, Nieman Lab’s faux birthday wasn’t shouted out after a test $5 contribution).
“Producing this free daily newsletter for the Fort Collins community is not an easy job,” reads the call to action. “We are dedicated to keeping Good Day Fort Collins free forever — like local news should be. But that is not without challenge!”
It appears Deck’s exposé on the company has already led some advertisers to pull out, with one company spokesperson telling the author, “After reviewing these newsletters we’ve ended the program with our third-party vendor that included Good Daily.”
Deck also spoke with a local Fort Collins attorney who advertised in the newsletter and indicated the ads appeared to have gotten tens of thousands of views.
Then there’s this:
The peculiarities with Good Daily don’t stop there. Henderson has launched a “give back” program in roughly half of the markets he’s operating in, more than 150 towns and cities. Readers can vote each day for one local nonprofit on the newsletter websites. At the end of the year, each newsletter promises to “donate 10% of our advertising profits” to the organization with the most votes.
One winner last year was the Children’s Speech & Reading Center in Fort Collins.
The organization’s director apparently hadn’t known the center had even won until Deck told her during his reporting for the Nieman Lab story.
She said she reached out to the Good Daily operator and then told Deck what she’d learned: “I did hear back … but they said that they didn’t know what the ‘prize’ would be, that they’d had a rough year financially.”
Asked about that, Henderson told Deck that winners were entitled to 10% of profits and some would be very small or nonexistent. “For markets where we end up not earning a profit, we’ll be working directly with the winners to design creative packages (generous amounts of advertising credits, etc.) to support them this year,” he told the author.
It’s hard to say how popular the two newsletters purportedly serving Fort Collins and Pueblo are, but the story did include this:
A thread on the Fort Collins, Colorado subreddit includes over a dozen residents asking about the newsletter and speculating about how it got ahold of their email addresses. Some were more than happy to receive it.
“It’s the only instance I can think of where spam seems to actually provide value,” reads one comment.
“I haven’t unsubscribed yet because it’s the only local news I get,” reads another.
That Reddit thread was actually one of the first things Deck found in his reporting, he told me, and the first piece of evidence he had that real local residents were subscribed to and reading these newsletters.
“Then I found social posts that showed Fort Collins nonprofits had been leading subscription campaigns for the newsletter prize,” he said. “I worked my way back from there.”
For my part, I first heard about Good Day Pueblo last fall from a resident in that community who indicated he was having trouble figuring out who was behind it.
“It’s pretty basic aggregation,” the person said when I asked if the newsletter was any good.
In October, I emailed its editor seeking to learn more about Good Day Pueblo and asking to talk on the phone. I followed up, and after not hearing back, set it on the back burner, considering the newsletter a questionable endeavor.
Kudos to Andrew Deck for digging deep.
