Over the past couple of months, several new websites have started posting content about Lexington.
These aren’t new town-sponsored pages, blogs written by your neighbors, or traditional journalism like the Lexington Observer.
These are websites that publish AI-generated content about Lexington news and events.
LexObserver has found four different Lexington-centric versions of these sites — The Lexington-Concord Courier, and Lexington-specific pages on Nanopress, Townbrief, and GatherGov. But there could be more out there, and likely will be more to come.
The Lexington-Concord Courier appears, on the surface, like a local newspaper site. If you Google, “What is the Lexington-Concord Courier?” Google’s AI tool, Gemini, will tell you, “The Lexington-Concord Courier is an independent local news publication covering Lexington, Concord, and the surrounding communities in Massachusetts.”
On its “About Us” page, Courier says it’s “dedicated to delivering high-quality, independent local journalism that informs, engages, and strengthens our community.”
But some longtime journalists beg to differ.
“To put it bluntly, I think it’s garbage,” Jesse Floyd, editor in chief of the Belmont Voice, the nonprofit newspaper that covers Belmont, MA, told the Observer.
Why? Mainly because the content Courier publishes is created by AI.
As explained on its website, Courier uses AI to report, research, draft, and produce its posts.
It says each post is checked by human editors before publication. Parent company Surround Sound Media’s site says those human editors are “experienced journalists.” But a deeper dive into those employees shows that many of them are recent college graduates, some without any journalism experience at all — and they are each managing about a dozen sites.
Surround Sound Media has 175 “newsrooms” across the nation as of Nov. 12, and 12 “producers” — the humans that manage the sites (there are no reporters, editors or photographers mentioned anywhere). The producer of the Lexington-Concord Courier is Cameron Joyce, a Rhode Island resident and recent graduate of the University of Alabama. In addition to being the only human working on Courier, Joyce also manages 15 other news sites across Georgia, Texas, and Massachusetts. And, he has a second job as a writer for the online sports publication, “Ball Exclusives.”
As the producer of Courier, part of Joyce’s job is to “do the work that requires human judgment: determine what is important, ask questions and make sure a story is accurate and useful,” Surround Sound Media’s site says.
But Courier’s posts are noticeably different from the news articles legacy newsrooms publish.
The site’s posts don’t usually include any quotes from interviews (because its AI tool does not conduct interviews with sources). They published an article on Oct. 29 titled, “Lexington board tackles high school project, solar plan,” which would seem to be about Lexington High School building project updates that were discussed during a recent meeting. The LHS building project is one of the most talked-about topics in Lexington and residents have publicly vocalized opinions — ad nauseam, some might argue — for years. But if you read the body of Courier’s article, it states, “the specific content of the Oct. 26 schedule discussion was not available at publication.”
Since Courier doesn’t have any humans based in Lexington, the site doesn’t have any original photography. Some posts use generic images from Wikimedia or other free sources. Others are accompanied by images created by AI — like in this post about midterm election results.
And though it is difficult to say for certain, there are a few instances where Courier seems to have replicated articles first published by the Lexington Observer, without attribution.
For example, LexObserver published an article about perks that come with a Cary Library card, titled “7 free resources you’re missing out on at Cary Library,” on Aug. 4. The idea for that piece came from student reporter Victoria Woo, who had just learned about some of these resources available at her local library and wanted to share. Two days later, Courier published roughly the same article, titled, “How to use Cary Library’s museum passes, digital media and local archives.” Similar examples occurred with LexObserver’s article on a resident’s scientific research (here’s Courier’s article, posted two weeks later), and a story LexObserver wrote on the Alpha school (Courier’s rendition was posted a week later).
Despite all of this, Surround Sound Media says its work “is guided by established professional journalism principles, including the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.” The SPJ code of ethics is a time-honored set of rules for journalism, often aptly hung on the wall above a water bubbler in a newsroom.
SPJ recently updated its code of ethics because of AI. Some additions include:
- “Ethical journalists are people who act with integrity.” Before its recent update, it didn’t specify that journalists are people, but this change was made to underscore “that journalism is fundamentally a human endeavor,” the SPJ wrote in a document explaining why it made the changes it did.
- “Never publish fabricated content that could be confused with reality.” The SPJ explains that that was added because, “the tenet uses the words ‘fabricated’ and ‘content’ to better address AI-generated images, graphics and the misuse of AI in image production.”
- “Journalists are ethically responsible for their work, regardless of the tools and technologies used.” This was added, in part, because, “there are concerns about work generated by AI but published under people’s bylines (willingly and unwillingly),” SPJ explained.
That last point is relevant because despite all of its content being written by AI, Courier uses bylines that read, “By Lexington Concord Courier Staff.” If a reader didn’t take it upon themselves to read Courier’s “About” page, the only place on the site where it is disclosed that all posts are written by AI, they might assume “staff” means humans.
LexObserver emailed back and forth with Surround Sound Media for a few days in the hope of talking to someone about their business, but nobody was available to speak in time for publication.
But in a statement, a Surround Sound Media spokesperson wrote, “Our mission is to give Greater Boston residents reliable information about their schools, local government, businesses and neighbors, creating a shared foundation of facts for community life. In our hybrid newsrooms, journalists set the coverage agenda, choose sources and make the final decisions about what we publish. AI tools help monitor public records, identify developments and prepare drafts, which journalists check against source material, edit and put into context before publication.”
The other three sites that LexObserver found — Nanopress, Townbrief, and GatherGov — are a bit different from Courier. For startes, they don’t claim to be newspapers.
And, for what it’s worth, two are semi-local: Nanopress was started by Arlington resident Winston Chen, and Townbrief’s site lists an address in Wayland. Both run multiple sites covering different towns, mostly in the Boston area.
Nanopress uses AI to curate a free newsletter that compiles short AI-written summaries of local news and events for 163 Massachusetts communities and seven Rhode Island communities. Most of their information comes from official town websites, local news sites, and the events pages of libraries, churches, and other local institutions. They attribute and link to the websites they pull information from at the bottom of each summary.
Some people find Nanopress to be less harmful than sites like Courier.
“One of the things that I like about Nanopress, despite my ambivalence about AI, is that there’s a human hand and intelligence behind it,” Lexington resident and LexObserver writer Jeri Zeder told the Observer. “The people there put their names on their website, they have a way to contact them very easily. I have contacted them when I felt they made an error and they have always come back and said, ‘we looked into what you said, and you’re right, and we’re issuing a correction, and we’re working on our algorithms so that won’t happen again.’ I think that’s all admirable.”
Zeder noted that Nanopress has shared posts from the Lexington-Concord Courier, though, which she does not like.
“That, to me, looks like everything that’s terrible about AI, and why Nanopress relies on anything that they put out at all bothers me,” she said.
Others argue the content produced by Nanopresses of the world could hurt traditional newsrooms.
“If they’re scraping your site, getting the gist of your story, and they’re sending that stuff out, and viewers are not clicking through it to your site, then you’re losing that traffic, and you’re losing that leverage as far as going to advertisers and saying, ‘see, we’ve got 6,000 page views on each story,’” Floyd said.
The Observer reached out to Chen for an interview but did not hear back in time for publication.
Townbrief is a bit different. It posts AI-written summaries of AI transcriptions of town government meetings. This has also garnered mixed reviews.
Dan Kennedy, a founder of “What Works: The Future of Local News,” a media project, podcast, and book franchise about rebuilding community journalism, thinks a tool like this could be helpful behind the scenes in newsrooms. In a conversation with the Observer, he mentioned the Midcoast Villager in Maine, which uses AI as a newsroom tool. The Midcoast Villager partnered with Civic Sunlight, a company that uses AI to make local government more accessible. The Villager uses Civic Sunlight’s tool to transcribe and summarize meetings across the 43 towns it covers. Human reporters then look through those AI outputs to see if there is anything newsworthy to write an article on.
“That is absolutely the right way to do it,” Kennedy, who is also a journalism professor at Northeastern University, told the Observer. LexObserver is currently considering adopting a similar tool.
But AI-written content should never be published by a newsroom, he added.
Floyd thinks humans could still do it better, arguing, “part of what makes the job special is the human element of it.”
For example, Floyd said, he could send two reporters to one meeting, and because of “human curiosity, which doesn’t exist within the computer,” they could come out with different story ideas.
And then there’s GatherGov, which produces the same kind of content as Townbrief. But GatherGov’s goal isn’t to be a newsroom at all. It actually was created to help forecast the real estate industry, part of which includes using AI to transcribe and write summaries of town government meetings.
Surround Sound Media and Nanopress were ostensibly created for similar purposes — to serve news deserts.
As Surround Sound Media’s site explains, “Newsrooms shrank. Reporters were asked to cover more with less. Little by little, fewer journalists were there to watch the school board, explain the zoning vote, cover the high school championship, introduce the new restaurant down the street, or tell the stories of ordinary neighbors doing extraordinary things…Surround Sound Media is building a resilient model to meet this need.”
In an interview with the Globe about Nano Media, a precursor to Nanopress started by Chen and journalist David Trilling, Chen said, “the town of Arlington, for practical purposes, is a news desert.”
But Arlington is actually one of the hundreds of communities across the nation that has a nonprofit newspaper (YourArlington, which started in 2006), run by experienced local journalists.
The US has lost more than a third of its newspapers in the past 20 years. But local news has started to see a resurgence. In the past few years, senior reporters and editors have left their newsrooms to start their own local nonprofit papers. Just in the Boston area, dozens of local newsrooms have popped up or been revitalized. Brookline has Brookline.News and Waltham has the Waltham Times. Cambridge, Bedford, and Concord all have locally run, nonprofit newsrooms.
Asked how the newer nonprofits that have been working to revive local news can remain competitive against their automated counterparts, Floyd argued journalists will have to hope the consumer cares enough to choose the human-made work.
“The answer could be that we just continue to emphasize to readers that, you can read the AI slop, or you can read the journalism and the prose that dates back to Nellie Bly and Hemingway, and Ernie Pyle, and Mike Royko, and those great writers of the past who bring that forward to us. We are the torchbearers of that, and we will continue to do our process, and work our stories, because I have to hope that will hold. I have to have faith that people are critical consumers and they’ll look at the AI and they’ll be like, ‘that doesn’t read right, that can’t be right,’ and they’ll look at our story and be like, ‘okay, so a person who can think critically was sitting in that meeting or was talking to that person and asked the next question.’”
Kennedy thinks the answer might not be in the writing. He argued local newspapers have two missions: “One of them is to report the news. The other one is to serve as an engine of civic engagement.”
“Be at the farmers’ markets, organize events, serve as a public forum, give people a chance to meet and greet your journalists, and be really a part of the fabric of the community,” he said. “That’s something that AI will never be able to do…I think all of these other issues that we’ve talked about are important, but they pale compared to that.”