Your Local Paper: Now a Franchise

Your local paper has opened 1,180 new locations, and somehow none of them is in your town.

NewsGuard, via USA Today on October 30, counted 22 partisan sites launched this year masquerading as independent local news, bringing the total number of such sites to 1,181. These are the outlets known as pink slime: sites that present themselves as professional news operations while secretly backed by partisan groups with an undisclosed agenda. They now outnumber the nation's daily newspapers.

The franchise model is impressively consistent. Every town gets the same layout, the same breathless local headlines, and the same suspiciously national opinions, with only the town name swapped out. The Springfield Gazette covers Springfield with the same enthusiasm it covers everywhere else, because the Springfield Gazette is everywhere else.

Note what this post does not do: it does not tell you which side the 1,181 sites are on, because the reporting does not break the count down by lean, and inventing a breakdown would be exactly the kind of thing a fake local paper would do. The masquerade is the story, and the masquerade belongs to everyone.

Now hiring: local reporters. Location: anywhere but here.

The underlying reporting is filed in the Evidence Locker: USA Today (Oct. 30, 2026); NewsGuard (Oct. 2026).