If you believe the internet, in his first month at the Ashland Daily Tidings, reporter Joe Minihane skied the slopes of Mount Ashland, ate at 15 restaurants in Roseburg, hiked the Owyhee Canyonlands in Malheur County, took in Autzen Stadium and Multnomah Falls and visited the Neskowin Ghost Forest on the Oregon Coast.

And sure, more than 1,200 miles of travel to write 10 stories in a month might seem excessive for a local outdoors reporter who was new to his southern Oregon job, but who could argue with his output?

Minihane could.

“I mean, the bylines are just bizarre because they’re on topics a) of which I have no understanding and b) I’ve been to Oregon once in my life for a very, very lovely holiday in Portland,” the United Kingdom-based writer told Oregon Public Broadcasting.

The Ashland Daily Tidings — established as a newspaper in 1876 — ceased operations in 2023, but if you were a local reader, you may not have known. Almost as soon as it closed, a website for the Tidings reemerged, boasting a team of eight reporters, Minihane included, who cranked out densely reported stories every few days.

And those reporters were covering a lot more than local news. They dove into Oregon’s fentanyl crisis, homelessness in Eugene and the food scene in Portland — essentially any issue that might draw attention from Oregonians.

The reality was that none of the people allegedly working for the Daily Tidings existed, or at least were who they claimed to be. The bylines listed on Daily Tidings articles were put there by scammers using artificial intelligence, and in some cases stolen identities, to dupe local readers.

“It seems quite terrifying,” said Minihane, an actual journalist and author who learned he had his identity stolen after Oregon Public Broadcasting contacted him. “I have friends who live in Portland, but I’ve never been to another part of the state, so I just don’t know quite how it came to pass.”

The mysterious takeover of a more than 140-year-old news outlet offers a warning of how local news is at risk of disappearing in Oregon’s rural communities, and what an online future supercharged by the next unregulated wave of technology from Silicon Valley companies may hold for news consumers.

Plagiarism, by any other name

The mysterious emergence of AI invaders on the local news scene is a new development in Oregon, and the Ashland Daily Tidings website appears designed to hide its true operators.

After Rosebud Media, which owned the Daily Tidings and the Mail Tribune in Medford, closed in 2023, the Daily Tidings website emerged again with a claimed staff of eight contributors, none of whom are reporters working in southern Oregon.

Oregon Public Broadcasting used various methods to track down all of the listed reporters on the Daily Tidings webpage, including searching social media and contacting former employers. After OPB began reaching out to people credited on the Tidings’ stories, more than half the staff disappeared from the page and their bylines were replaced on existing stories. Three journalists who responded to OPB’s requests for comment said they had no idea their names or images were being used to produce stories for the Daily Tidings.

“Plagiarism, I think it’s called,” quipped Bert Etling, the former editor of the Daily Tidings who now runs the digital nonprofit media outlet Ashland.news.

Etling, who started his local journalism career in 1982 and was laid off in 2019 by Rosebud Media, noticed the revived Daily Tidings soon after it emerged because his own reporters saw work remarkably similar to their own appearing on the webpage. The stories would have fresh headlines and the writing would be tweaked, but the reporting and quotes from sources would closely match work Ashland.news had previously published. OPB staff members have also had their work taken and republished on the Daily Tidings website with marginally changed sentences.

“They just put it in a blender and then pour it out on their page,” Etling said. “It’s maddening.”

The source

The Daily Tidings claims on its website that it was acquired by Difference Media LLC, in 2021. Difference Media was founded by a father and son in Texas to promote Christian music. Speaking to Oregon Public Broadcasting, a company official said they were not aware of the Daily Tidings and that the company owns no newspapers.

OPB reached out to the operators of the Daily Tidings through the website’s contact form and listed email for the paper’s news desk, but received no reply.

The alleged timeline of the Difference Media purchase also does not line up with the Daily Tidings’ prior ownership.

When owner Steve Saslow closed Rosebud Media in 2023, the web domain for the Daily Tidings and the Mail Tribune became inactive, creating an opportunity for the fraudulent version to replace it.

In his first interview since closing the papers, Saslow told OPB he had his attorneys pursue litigation against whomever is behind the AI-written stories for copyright infringement. The lawyers told him the fraudulent acts are coming from outside the United States, likely in China, and they described the legal quest as akin to “pursuing a phantom.”

“They do this apparently with either existing or defunct newspapers around the world,” Saslow said. “(My lawyers) said you could go and spend all kinds of money, and trying to find them would be a needle in a haystack if we could do it at all.”

Saslow opted not to spend that money chasing down the fraudsters. There’s little doubt money is the reason behind the fraud, however.

The Daily Tidings website, despite its reliance on copyright infringement and stolen identities, presents readers with banners and pop-up videos from major advertisement-serving companies on the internet, such as Google, YieldMo and the Trade Desk. Display ads like those on the website can earn the site’s operators a few dollars for each 1,000 appearances the ads make, potentially making the endless churn of stolen stories a lucrative business.

After being alerted to the scam by Oregon Public Broadcasting, Google took action against the Daily Tidings website by removing its ads from specific pages on the website the tech giant viewed as violating its terms of service.