When Florida reporter Kate Payne stumbled across a local news site called The South Florida Standard, something about it felt off. She’d never heard of the outlet before and didn’t know any of the journalists who were listed on its staff, even though their bios touted long careers in Florida journalism. The articles the site was publishing seemed like very normal local news stories, but they were often plagiarizing the reporting of other Florida news outlets. The coverage didn’t have any obvious political agenda or bias. And Kate couldn’t see a way the site was making any money; there were no ads or ways to subscribe.

What was going on here?

After Kate told Question Everything producer Zach St. Louis about this, he got sucked into the mystery – and ended up solving it. A bizarre whodunnit for our AI age.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And subscribe to our newsletter please!

Kate Payne reported a version of this story for The Florida Trib, which you can read here.

Jeremy Carrasco is director of Riddance and the creator of JeremyFindsAI.

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What would it take to actually fix America’s broken journalism industry? Using rural North Carolina as a petri dish, the podcast Scene on Radio spent their latest season, called “The News”, diagnosing how American journalism is failing the public: collapsing local newsrooms, corporate consolidation, an information crisis nobody seems able to solve.

In the final episode of “The News”, host John Biewen and co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika turn to solutions: how can good journalism survive, and what is the vision for a new age of robust, public interest journalism?

You can hear the full season of Scene on Radio wherever you get your podcasts.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

Guests:

• John Biewen, co-host of Scene on Radio
• Chenjerai Kumanyika , co-host of Scene on Radio
• Les High, Founder and publisher of The Border Belt Independent
• Victor Pickard, co-director of the Media, Inequality & Change (MIC) Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication

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• Zbiotics

Local reporters from around the country tell stories of using the experiences of their neighbors to confront people in power.

Guests:

• Anna Wolfe with Mississippi Today
• Lisa Halverstadt with Voice of San Diego
• Alissa Zhu with The Baltimore Banner
• Tony Plohetski with The Austin American-Statesman and KVUE Austin

Lisa is a part of the Homelessness Beat Reporters Collective, which recently produced a guide on how to responsibly cover homelessness. That guide can be found here.

Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Follow us on Instagram: @questionverything.podcast. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter.

This episode was originally published on June 26th, 2024.

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