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Reading sad things about journalism — newspapers, especially — has been a big part of my job for almost two decades. On Monday, I came across such a story that seemed to be getting traction on social media . According to the link aggregator Sill , 18 people I follow on Bluesky had shared a link to it within a few hours.

The headline was a grabber: “The Ghost Paper That Ate Alabama: How a Media Startup Killed 47 Weekly Newspapers and No One Noticed.” It was a site named The Editorial , whose name rang a vague bell for me.

I clicked through. The subhead: “Inside the rise and collapse of 1819 News, the right-wing media chain that bought up rural weeklies, fired their staff, and replaced them with AI-generated content.”

I’d heard of 1819 News , of course, though not for good reasons. The conservative news site, named for Alabama’s statehood year, made national news for writing what seemed to many like needless stories exposing a small-town mayor’s crossdressing habit ; 48 hours later, the mayor committed suicide. (1819 News’ editor-in-chief later said he was “ at peace ” with the decision to publish.) But I hadn’t heard anything about them buying up a bunch of weekly newspapers, so I read on.

The story in The Editorial , by Elena Marchetti, was meaty — about 1,900 words — and seemed to feature some good on-the-ground work. It reported that, in 2023, a new company named Alabama Community News LLC spent $3.2 million — money it got from 1819 News — buying up 47 different weekly newspapers in small towns across the state. The goal: to “use the papers’ subscriber lists and advertising relationships to build a statewide conservative media empire.”

The new corporation immediately centralized operations across all papers, cutting back on staff and turning to AI for stories: