The Ashland Daily Tidings was established as a newspaper in 1876 and ceased operations in 2023. But local readers may not have known that. The Daily Tidings website re-emerged after the closure with a claimed staff of eight contributors, none of whom are reporters working in Southern Oregon. The website features a regular slate of “stories” that appear to be written by artificial intelligence. OPB editor Ryan Haas joins us to talk about his investigation into the AI takeover of the Southern Oregon paper.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Ashland Daily Tidings was established as a newspaper in 1876. It ceased operations last year. But then something really weird happened. The Daily Tidings website reemerged with a claimed staff of eight contributors, but none of them are reporters working in Southern Oregon. In fact, the website features a regular slate of “stories” that appear to be pulled from other publications and rewritten by artificial intelligence.
OPB editor Ryan Haas joins us to talk about his investigation into a kind of zombie paper in Southern Oregon and the lessons it could hold for the future of journalism. Ryan, good to have you back.
Ryan Haas: Hey, Dave.
Miller: Ryan, what first tipped you off about this story?
Haas: It was actually here in our very newsroom. I had a couple of reporters come to me and said, “Hey, I wrote this story and it appeared on this website. This is weird.” So I, as the editor in the newsroom, was like, “Well, great. I’ll just reach out and tell them, please stop doing this.” And I just ended up in this very bizarre place with this website.
Miller: Let’s get a little bit of context before we hear about that journey to try to find who was doing what. The Daily Tidings has had a really tumultuous decade even before this bizarre twist. What happened in terms of ownership transfer since 2017?
Haas: I think the Daily Tidings was like a lot of newspapers in Oregon and across the country, where new owners are coming in, buying it, shrinking it and selling it because it’s not really a viable business necessarily. So in 2017, Rosebud Media comes in. They buy the Daily Tidings and the Mail Tribune – its sister paper from Gatehouse Media. They try to reinvent it, they try pivoting to video and all these things and it just doesn’t work. So they end up closing publication of the Tidings and condensing the papers to one paper, and then eventually shutting both papers down in 2023.
Miller: So this takes us just to last year. What happened to the Daily Tidings website at that point?
Haas: Well, almost immediately after this paper closes, this website comes back up: Ashland Daily Tidings. So if I’m a local reader, I don’t really even notice necessarily. And this newspaper is just flooded with a huge range of stories. Some of them are from Ashland, but a lot are from other parts of Oregon – Eugene, Portland, Eastern Oregon along the Idaho border – and it’s just kind of confusing. Who’s behind this? Why are all these stories publishing here?
Miller: When you started reporting this story, what did the staff page look like?
Haas: So the Ashland Daily Tidings claimed it had eight staff members and at a glance, they look real. It’s people’s faces, their names, it lists the type of work that they’re doing. Some people are covering outdoors, some are covering beauty and the food scene, and sports. What I found, though, was at least two of these are writers for the Daily Mail in London. I found a third person who was also a UK-based writer. Two had social media profiles that indicated their journalism experience was in South Africa. One claimed to be a former writer for The Stranger in Seattle. And funny enough, one person had their actual real job listed, a sports writer for the Rogue Valley Times, which was another newspaper that was not the Ashland Daily Tidings. So pretty early on, as I was looking at these, I got a sense [that] something bizarre is going on here.
Miller: What do you do to try to talk to these people?
Haas: I spent a lot of time researching them, which was bizarre, honestly, because most journalists, especially in today’s news environment, have a pretty strong online presence. Our work depends on it. We’re on social media trying to promote our work and a lot of these folks didn’t. It was very hard to find them. So I’m tracking down any social media they have, contacting former employers, reaching out to them. And a lot of them didn’t respond, but some of them did.
Miller: One of them was Joe Minihane. Can you, first of all, describe the work attributed to this guy?
Haas: It was mostly outdoors type reporting and Oregonians are probably very familiar with these types of stories – I went to such and such trail, here’s how to access it or here’s a review of this outdoor space – kind of this bread and butter that a very outdoorsy state like ours might go on. But the bizarre thing was that he was writing from places that were very far away from Southern Oregon. I tracked down his first month of stories and he would have had to have traveled something like 1,200 miles in 30 days to write all these stories, which obviously did not add up very well. And even beyond that, he’s writing restaurant reviews, he’s writing stories about Autzen Stadium. It was just weird.
Miller: What were you able to learn about this actual person?
Haas: Well, he is actually a journalist. After some tracking down, I found out that he’s a published author, he does travel writing for other publications like The Guardian and CNN. But he had never heard of the Daily Tidings. Here’s how he put it to me …
Joe Minihane [recording]: The bylines are just bizarre because they’re on topics (a) of which I have no understanding, and (b) I’ve been to Oregon once in my life for a very, very lovely holiday in Portland some eight years ago with my wife. But I’ve never been to another part of the state. So I just don’t know quite how it came to pass.
Haas: When I reached out to him he didn’t even really believe me. He was like, “I write a lot of stuff for CNN. Maybe it’s syndicated.” I was like, “No, Joe, you got to read these stories.” He was shocked. He’s like, “They’re stealing my identity and pretending I’m in Oregon and writing stories.” Funny enough, he even had his own personal website. He let the domain lapse and someone probably, using AI, took that and pretended to be him. So this is the second time he’s had his identity stolen.
Miller: He sounded sort of like, just in that conversation you had with him, good natured about this. Was he not upset? Was he not scared?
Haas: I mean, he said he was, but he was also like, “I don’t even know what I can do about this. After my website got taken over, I have no ability to even get it back.” And there’s this whole website pretending to be him that’s still out there and he’s like, “I just have no power over this. So, what can I do?”
Miller: Can you describe the style of these articles?
Haas: So these are essentially real articles that are being rewritten in this kind of poorly done AI way that many people might be familiar with. If you’ve played with ChatGPT or some of these AI tools, the writing is kind of simple. It’s very basic and can be a little lacking in clarity, but it generally tells the story. And what I found was what’s likely happening here is they’re taking real articles that real journalists are writing, including folks here at OPB, and they’re putting them in these things that are kind of coined AI spinners. They basically rewrite the article, so you can’t just simply find out this person’s just copy and pasting this, and then posting it as original work.
Miller: So you mentioned OPB. What other original sources does the website seem to draw from?
Haas: If you are a working journalist in Oregon, you’ve probably had your work taken by this website. I found stories that linked back to our colleagues in public media, Jefferson Public Radio … The Oregonian, OPB, Willamette Week. Basically any media publication that people are familiar with here in Oregon was being republished on this website.
Miller: It says on the “About” page that Daily Tidings.com was acquired in 2021 by Difference Media, LLC. That date is wrong – as we talked about the beginning, it was 2023 when the former owners closed this down. But what did you hear when you reached out to this place, Difference Media?
Haas: I thought, I’ll just contact this company. I’ll find out what’s going on here. It turns out Difference Media is not actually what it sounds like. It is not a news publishing company. It is actually a Christian music company. I finally got a hold of a representative there and they said the same thing Joe said to me when I contacted him – what is going on exactly? And he looks at the website and he says, “This is crazy. We don’t even own newspapers. We deal in Christian music.” So they have no idea what’s going on and do not own this paper.
Miller: So let’s cut through some of this or all this. What is your best understanding of what’s going on?
Haas: So my understanding, from a lot of sources I talked to, is that this is probably coming from overseas. The Ashland Daily Tidings, when it closed, whoever’s behind this came in, saw this web domain had gone dormant, took it over and is running these articles. It is very difficult to figure out who is behind this. I’ve reached out to technical experts [asking if] there’s anything in this website that we can figure out where this is coming from? They said, not really, you can reach out to the domain provider but there’s really no way to track down. I’ve tried to contact everyone through this website, anyone who might be associated with this, and [there’s] no solid answer on who’s behind this.
Miller: What would the business model be?
Haas: What they’re doing is they are running ads against these stories that they’re putting up. So every time you click on one of these stories, you see a little banner at the bottom or maybe a video pops up, and those ads are served by large companies like Google or many other types of companies that serve these ads. And every time one of those webpages gets 1,000 clicks, maybe you get a couple bucks. Well, if you’re putting out 250 or 400 articles a month, like this website is doing, and maybe whoever’s behind this is running other websites like this, that adds up, right? It may only be $2 or $3 here or there, but if that’s adding up over several months … and especially if this is coming from overseas, maybe U.S. currency is a little more valuable there. So that is essentially the business model that’s being run here.
Miller: The big companies, the Googles or a handful of others – would they be the way to throttle this to say we’re not going to give you our business because we know that you’re fake?
Haas: Potentially, yes, they have the power to do that. And I reached out to Google as part of my story and they said, OK, this sounds bad. “Can you provide us evidence?” I provided ample evidence. I provided them with quotes from Joe and other people I spoke to and they said, OK, great. “We’ll get back to you.” And eventually they got back to me and said, “We’re going to demonetize some pages on this website that we have determined violate our policies.” And lo and behold, yes, they have done that. But there are still many ads from Google that are being served on this website. So it’s probably still in their financial interest that things like this continue to operate.
Miller: I have to say that this is not the most annoying or problematic piece of this, but it rankles me that at the bottom of these “articles,” if you want to comment – I don’t know why you would, but if you want to – they make you click in a box that says, “verify that you are human.” Even though the purported writers of these, it seems pretty clear, are not human. Is there a way to know how successful this is, how many people are being duped by the site and clicking on these articles?
Haas: It’s hard to say. It’s hard to get an exact number, just because we don’t know the analytics on this. However, I will say after I published this story, I did have one person reach out to me who moved to Ashland from California and said, yeah, when I moved here, I saw all these Daily Tidings mailboxes – you know, the paper boxes on people’s mailboxes – and I thought, hey, this is a legitimate website. He said, until I read your article, I had no idea that this was fake. So there are people being fooled by this.
Miller: I hadn’t even thought of that as sort of existing infrastructural ads, in a sense, for a defunct paper that does exist in a ghostly zombie AI form.
Haas: That’s right. The legacy of the old paper.
Miller: One of the first people to notice that something weird was going on was former Daily Tidings owner Steve Saslow. What did you hear from him about this?
Haas: So Steve Saslow was the owner of Rosebud Media, which was the final owner before the Daily Tidings and Medford Mail Tribune closed. He still owns the trademark to the Daily Tidings. And he told me he’s really frustrated by this. He said he asked his lawyers at Loeb & Loeb, which is a very large law firm, to look into this and they essentially came back and said, “Look, you’re basically chasing a ghost. You can spend $100,000 trying to chase this down and maybe we can find who’s behind this, but maybe we won’t.” So he ultimately said that it was just too expensive and not worth it for him. He’s pretty annoyed that it’s happening, but he also feels much like Joe, that his hands are tied. He doesn’t know what to do.
Miller: What did you hear about all of this from Bert Etling, the former editor of the Daily Tidings? He now runs a digital nonprofit called Ashland News.
Haas: He was aware of this fraud, like all the journalists in Southern Oregon around this. It was funny. I talked to many people and they’re like, gosh, this thing is so frustrating, we don’t even know what to do about it. He said local readers still reach out to him about it. They say, “What’s going on there?” But I found him surprisingly optimistic. He said he believes that the counter to all this is just being in the community and doing good journalism. He says Ashland.News is growing and he still says the business of news media needs to change. This is the old model and it doesn’t really work. Here’s what he had to say to me …
Bert Etling [recording]: People had it easy with the subsidized newspaper. And it was subsidized by capitalism-assisted democracy by selling sofas and mattresses on the pages of your newspaper, and making it really cheap to get. That’s gone away and it’s not coming back.
Haas: So, for Etling, the new model to him is nonprofit news. He says this isn’t a profitable business that way. But it’s up to journalists to be in their community, reach out to people and be making these connections that AI cannot do. They can’t be out in the physical place. He told me this story about marching in the parade and how much people appreciated seeing their local community members producing the journalism that’s happening there. And so that’s what he sees as kind of his mission and his goal with local journalism.
Miller: This is just one website purporting to be providing news to a city in Southern Oregon. What do you see as the larger repercussions of this?
Haas: It’s huge. I think we’re kind of at a critical moment right now with the rise of this AI stuff because it’s starting to pop up everywhere. I’ve had several people reach out to me since this story published and say, “Hey, did you see this AI site [or] this one?” These are all in Oregon and they’re not as severe of scams where you’re stealing people’s identities. But they are just this “slop,” what I call it in my story, where it’s just publishing stuff that is not reported, it’s not vetted information. It’s just stuff that’s online to get you to look at it.
I think we’re going to see more of this as AI continues to grow. I think it’s really on both Oregonians who are consuming the news to know where their stories are coming from and do their best to vet this, and on the journalist to say, “We are your community members, we are here to serve you, we’re here to present you with good information.” That is really the only way to push back against this.
Miller: Ryan, thanks very much.
Haas: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Ryan Haas is the managing editor at OPB. You can read his article about this zombie version of the website of the Ashland Daily Tidings at opb.org.
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