This story was reported in partnership with Question Everything from KCRW and Placement Theory.

South Florida journalist Sofia Delgado was having a great year.

Reporters at the news outlet she helped launch a few months ago, the South Florida Standard, had been regularly publishing three stories a day, every day of the week – including weekends – with articles ranging from a story detailing the Florida Legislature’s budget breakdown, to federal health care workers quitting rather than taking mandatory assignments at Guantanamo Bay, to revelations that deaths at state mental hospitals were linked to systemic neglect. 

Born and raised in Hialeah, the bilingual editor-in-chief and mother of two, and her team even published four stories on Easter Sunday. 

It would be an impressive – and gruelling – output for many local news outlets in this era of shrinking newsroom budgets. 

If it were real.

Delgado and other “local journalists” identified as staff of the South Florida Standard are creations of artificial intelligence – complete with fake headshots and made-up biographies peppered with South Florida cliches, their bylines plastered on articles that were lifted from actual news outlets, recycled through AI and republished. (Administrators behind the site said they didn’t intend to plagiarize.)

By and large, the people identified as the outlet’s reporters have virtually no other professional history or digital footprint outside of the site, apart from a smattering of social media profiles created in early 2026 that have no posts and no followers.

Notable exceptions include two “reporters” who share the same names as people accused of or convicted of fraud or conspiracy in recent years. 

After The Florida Trib started asking questions about the South Florida Standard and its purported journalists, administrators of the site began tinkering with its contents and removing staff bios – before taking the site offline entirely. 

Previous versions of the site remain available on the Internet Archive.

A digital mirage masquerading as local news, the South Florida Standard underscores just how easy it has become to corrupt one of the country’s core institutions: independent journalism. At a time when trust in the media has eroded to a historic low, sham news sites like this one are increasingly common in Florida and across the country, a dangerous development for American democracy, experts told The Florida Trib.

The search to find out who was behind the mysterious South Florida Standard, which The Florida Trib undertook in partnership with the media and tech podcast Question Everything, also shows how easy it is for the real people behind these digital doppelgangers to remain in the shadows – evidence of the staggering capabilities of AI and the threat it can pose to an unsuspecting public in a damaged democracy. 

“Clearly, whoever’s behind this does not care about the truth,” said Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at The Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit dedicated to strengthening democracy by improving journalism.

“The only way to address it is to try and find somebody who actually controls the keys to this website,” she added. 

‘Take control of the narrative’

To investigate who was behind the South Florida Standard, The Florida Trib and Question Everything turned to experts to look for digital fingerprints in the source code of the site.

Casey Frechette, a journalism professor at the University of South Florida with two decades of web development experience, reviewed the South Florida Standard site and other associated entities at the request of The Florida Trib. 

Analyzing the code behind the sites, Frechette identified a trail of digital breadcrumbs that connect the South Florida Standard to a similar “local news” website in South Carolina known as the Charleston Sentinel and a tech-focused site in California called the San Francisco Download. All contained evidence that they were built from the same source code and are controlled by the same entity.

“There are really strong signals that this collection of sites is all part of the same network and specifically managed by the same operator,” Frechette said, adding that he was “99% confident” in the finding.

The three purportedly local news outlets share more than the same source code – they share an overlapping roster of “reporters” who have the same names as people who have been accused of or convicted of fraud or conspiracy in recent years. The Florida Trib has identified at least 9 such individuals across the three sites. 

Frechette’s analysis also confirmed that buried in the code of the “local news” sites were links to a Philadelphia-based online reputation management firm called The Discoverability Company, founded by tech executive Drew Chapin. 

A former startup CEO who pleaded guilty to defrauding investors in 2021, Chapin has since turned his personal experience of batting down embarrassing Google results and negative news articles about himself into a professional career – helping individual clients and businesses build their online reputations and bury their unwanted search results. 

Chapin is also a leader of the White Collar Support Group, a community of defrocked business executives helping each other navigate prison and life after lockup. 

Chapin says he finds meaning in helping people convicted of nonviolent crimes overcome online records that they feel don’t reflect who they are today – work that he says helps them secure housing, employment, and dignity.

“Personal online reputation is no different than what I had been doing my entire career, just that instead of building up a new mobile app or an e-commerce store, it was individuals,” Chapin explained in an online webinar for the White Collar Support Group earlier this year.

Chapin coached the group on how to build a “new online identity” – not by deleting all their social media accounts and erasing their digital history entirely, but by leveraging online properties like personal websites and news outlets to share a “counternarrative” that overpowers the problematic results of the past. 

Every podcast episode, every blog post, every news interview is a chance to build more authority within the search engines’ algorithms and rank their preferred results higher on the front page of Google, he explained.

“Every piece of content that you produce is another opportunity to claim one of those spots that you’re seeking to reclaim,” he said. 

“Your best approach here is to really displace the old stuff,” Chapin said. “Bury it. Take control of the narrative.”

A collapsing news ecosystem

The rise of the South Florida Standard and its sister sites in other communities comes as the country is facing a historic collapse of the traditional news industry. Longstanding news outlets – once trusted pillars of local communities – are closing their doors and leaving “news deserts” in their wake. Many that remain are laying off staff, while some experiment with AI-generated content themselves in an attempt to stay afloat. Websites masquerading as legitimate news outlets have rushed to fill the vacuum, many of them propped up by powerful corporate and political interests aiming to control the narrative and shape public opinion, with little transparency on their intent, ownership, and funding.

Known to academic researchers as “pink slime” outlets – named for the cheap meat by-product used as a filler in processed food – these sites now outnumber local daily newspapers in the United States, according to data analysis firm NewsGuard. As of June 2024, NewsGuard identified 1,265 “pink slime” outlets across the country, surpassing the 1,213 daily newspapers still in operation. Since 2005 alone, the country has lost almost 2,900 newspapers and almost two-thirds of its newspaper journalists – 43,000 of them – according to Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative.

With the lowest number of news outlets per capita in the continental United States, Florida’s media ecosystem could be especially vulnerable to the risks posed by these sham news outlets, now fueled by the advanced capabilities of AI. Long known as a sunny destination for transient retirees and fraudsters alike, Florida is central to the modern conservative political movement and a training ground for far-right ideologues and violent extremists. 

The state is no stranger to websites that covertly advance the agenda of powerful politicians and corporate interests as part of an elaborate strategy to bash critics, shape policy decisions, and influence elections. Researchers have found Florida is already home to dozens of so-called pink slime outlets that are 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 McBride of Poynter. “And in fact it has a negative impact on the news ecosystem, because it clutters the environment.”

A multi-state network of AI-driven ‘news’ sites

Identifying Chapin as the person behind the South Florida Standard was not a straightforward pursuit.

Site administrators for the Standard responded to a reporter’s initial questions through email and wouldn’t identify themselves.

“All names on our site are randomly-generated by artificial intelligence” and any apparent connections to real people “are coincidental,” they said in a statement.

“South Florida Standard has no corporate owner. It is a website we’re developing with the intent of building search engine authority and selling to a domain investor who may use it to develop a news property or newsletter or similar digital property. This is common in the SEO community,” the statement reads.

Questioned later by a reporter, Chapin, the founder of The Discoverability Company, acknowledged responsibility for the site, which he described as a six-month “experiment” to build “geographic topical authority” and to better understand the algorithmic staying power of his clients’ unwanted search results.

Chapin said he was unable to participate in an interview with The Florida Trib over the phone until late May, but he sat down with a reporter for Question Everything and responded to subsequent emailed questions from the Trib.

Archived versions of his news sites show at least one has been in operation for far longer than Chapin initially stated, dating back to 2023. At some points that year, every “reporter” listed on the homepage of the San Francisco Download shared the same name as someone convicted of fraud – including Chapin himself.

In some instances, past offenses align with the purported coverage areas of the “reporters”: a person convicted of duping buyers into purchasing Ferraris that didn’t exist now writes about the automotive industry. 

Some of the “reporters” also had personal websites identifying them as staffers at Chapin’s fake news outlets. Those personal sites, which bore markers linking them to The Discoverability Company, have also since been taken down, along with the news sites. 

“The work I do is about helping people advocate for themselves and assert themselves in the conversation happening about them online,” Chapin said.

“I don’t discuss specific client engagements and won’t confirm or deny any individual relationship,” he added.

In all, Chapin said he stood up 17 similar AI-driven news sites across the country, producing more than 3,500 URLs and drawing more than 44,000 visitors. Chapin wouldn’t disclose a full list, but the portfolio included sites purporting to cover state politics in New York and New Jersey, local news in Philadelphia, and even a Hawaii-based medical journal.

With a $10 domain name and a brief prompt, an AI assistant can pump out a new “local news” site, complete with a mission statement and masthead, a team of fake reporters with phony bios and email addresses, and a bevy of articles – all in just 15 minutes, as Chapin demonstrated for a reporter in real time. 

In the end, Chapin said his “experiment” didn’t work very well – search engines can tell the difference between the New York Times and a fake outlet, and his sites weren’t breaking through.

“I don’t know whose job it is to make sure that people are represented fairly and wholly online,” he said, adding “And I don’t agree with all the ways that the algorithm works.”

“But like you said,” he told a reporter, “that’s the game that you have to play.”

A ‘sophisticated’ deception

With another major election cycle looming, sites like the South Florida Standard paint an AI-generated picture of where the media landscape may be heading, as traditional news outlets go belly up and are rapidly replaced by pseudo-sites designed to deceive rather than inform.

Much of the content published by the South Florida Standard appears to have been lifted from Florida Politics, a website run by publisher Peter Schorsch, whose coverage has become a must-read for many political insiders and journalists.

Kevin DeLuca, a professor at Yale University who studies the political economy of media, has analyzed pink slime sites across the country. DeLuca described the South Florida Standard as “deceptive” and “more sophisticated” than other similar sites he’s seen, noting the fabricated reporters with professional-seeming headshots. 

While seemingly designed for a personal agenda, sites like the South Florida Standard have “obvious political uses,” DeLuca said. 

“When an opportunity arises, like a campaign needs some good publicity or a company wants to influence public opinion, then they’re set up basically to take that money and place the article,” he added.

A glimmer of hope, DeLuca says, is that researchers have found that pink slime sites don’t actually get a lot of traffic – but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact. 

In an email, Schorsch said the Standard is one of a number of sites he’s aware of that are “plAIgiarising” his content. AI bots pose a “definite threat” to his outlet, Schorsch said, because they scrape so much content at once that they can temporarily overwhelm his website and block his readers’ access.

Still, Schorsch remains confident in the viability of his publication.

“AI and these sham sites capture none of the nuance of real-world politics,” Schorsch said. 

“My real fear is that if the next generation of bots scrape info from these scammy sites to build their [large language models], the answers people will get about political news will be of the lowest common denominator,” he added. “It will be a copy of a copy of a copy of a fax sent to your phone.”

In short, DeLuca said, “not good for a democracy.”

Zach St. Louis, a producer for Question Everything from KCRW and Placement Theory, contributed to this story, along with Jeremy Carrasco, director of Riddance.ai, and Michael Vasquez, an investigative reporter for The Florida Trib.

Kate Payne is The Florida Trib’s state government reporter. She can be reached at kate.payne@floridatrib.org.