A former startup CEO who pleaded guilty to defrauding investors has been linked to a network of AI-generated fake local news outlets — built, by his own account, to manipulate how both people and search engines perceive people like him.
What do 1,000 journalists and PR pros know about AI that you don't? They took AI Quick Start, a 1-hour live class from The Media Copilot. 94% satisfaction. Find out how to work smarter with AI in just 60 minutes. Get 20% off with the code AIPRO: https://mediacopilot.ai/
Drew Chapin, who in 2021 pleaded guilty to investor fraud in connection with a failed tech startup, founded The Discoverability Company, a Philadelphia-based online reputation management firm. According to an investigation by The Florida Trib in partnership with KCRW’s Question Everything podcast, that firm is behind the South Florida Standard, a website that presented itself as a local news outlet but was, in fact, entirely AI-generated.
The South Florida Standard featured fake reporters with AI-created headshots and fabricated biographies. Stories were lifted from legitimate news organizations, run through AI, and republished as original content. The site published three stories a day, seven days a week—including Easter Sunday—under bylines that had no professional history or digital footprint outside the site.
The problem of AI-generated content disguised as legitimate journalism is one our coverage has tracked closely, and it’s getting harder to solve. Even as platforms roll out content credentials and provenance tools, Wikipedia has moved to ban AI-generated text entirely from its 7.1 million articles, citing hallucinations and fabricated citations. The South Florida Standard is a case study in why those bans exist.
Frechette’s analysis traced the South Florida Standard to at least two sister sites: the Charleston Sentinel in South Carolina and the San Francisco Download in California. All three were built from the same source code and controlled by the same entity. Across the network, The Florida Trib identified at least nine “reporters” who share names with people accused of or convicted of fraud or conspiracy.
Chapin acknowledged responsibility for the network, describing it as a six-month experiment to build what he called “geographic topical authority,” testing whether AI-generated news sites could rank alongside legitimate outlets in search results. He said he stood up 17 similar sites across the country, producing more than 3,500 URLs drawing more than 44,000 visitors.
“I don’t know whose job it is to make sure that people are represented fairly and wholly online,” Chapin told the outlet.
The experiment, by Chapin’s own account, didn’t work particularly well. Search engines, he said, could tell the difference between The New York Times and a fake outlet. His sites weren’t breaking through.
But the broader damage is harder to quantify. Known in academic research as “pink slime” journalism—named for the cheap meat by-product used as a filler—these fake news sites now outnumber local daily newspapers in the United States, according to data analysis firm NewsGuard. As of June 2024, NewsGuard identified 1,265 such outlets nationwide, surpassing the 1,213 daily newspapers still operating.
Florida, with the lowest number of news outlets per capita in the continental US, may be especially vulnerable. Researchers have found the state is already home to dozens of pink slime outlets, part of a national network of more than 1,000 sites backed by conservative think tanks, donors, and political operatives.
“Stuff like this has zero value to the public,” said Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at The Poynter Institute. “And in fact it has a negative impact on the news ecosystem, because it clutters the environment.”
The findings arrive as traditional local news continues its historic collapse. Real newsrooms are already experimenting with AI-generated content, and their own workers are pushing back. Since 2005, the country has lost almost 2,900 newspapers and roughly two-thirds of its newspaper journalists—43,000 positions—according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative. As real local news disappears, the vacuum doesn’t stay empty for long.
Edited by Pete Pachal
