What is Pink Slime Journalism?
The immediate image of pink slime is unpleasant: a gooey river of the stuff ran under New York City in the classic film Ghostbusters II, and even the strongest of stomachs turned upon seeing it for the first time. Pink slime journalism is mercifully free of the texture and more unpleasant sensory issues that come with meeting any type of slime, but it very much does clog up important structures around our society.
The term “pink slime” came about as a filler for ground beef and other processed meats. With pink slime added into the mix, it appears you’re eating more meat—but really, you’re eating less. And pink slime journalism does just that—claims to be giving you the stories that nobody else does, but instead, gives you junk. A 2019 article from the Columbia Journalism Review found that hundreds of these sites were clogging up cyberspace and that they disproportionately spewed conservative talking points.
In the past decade, a lot of pink slime websites have shown up on the internet in response to closings and dearths of local news sources in the United States. These websites weaponize the public’s trust in local news, which stands at a much higher margin than the public’s trust in larger newsrooms (i.e. CNN, New York Times) in order to make false or misleading claims.
Washington Post journalist Ryan Zickgraf offered some perspective on this:
“As local outlets have disappeared, many have been replaced by algorithmically managed pink-slime outlets that use the good will earned by news institutions of yore to help push political agendas from outside those communities. I know how the sausage is made, because I worked in the proverbial slaughterhouse of Metric Media’s predecessor in the early 2010s. Journatic was a start-up company that borrowed the buzzword-heavy language of Silicon Valley to obfuscate the fact that it wasn’t reinventing newspapers — it was merely disrupting the high cost of labor in the name of saving the industry from bankruptcy.”
“Poorly paid freelancers replaced staff reporters who had made living wages at newspapers like the Chicago Tribune. Part of my job was to write local news stories for the Houston Chronicle — even though I lived in Chicago — and select fake American-sounding bylines for stories written in virtual sweatshops in the Philippines. A Filipino writer named Junbe, for instance, might be renamed Jimmy Finkel, thanks to a built-in drop-down menu, and Gisele Bautista could instantly become Jenni Cox. These ‘reporters’ earned pennies per story, and much of the content was plagiarized. ‘It would pay off to have you both write and edit these stories only if you could write the stories in about 90 seconds,’ my remote supervisor told me.”
These websites exploit high-traffic stories for clicks while underpaying their employees and utilizing out-of-area labor, which betrays local news in several ways: one, by claiming to spread credible information by local journalists, and two, by exploiting the community rather than enriching it.
The issue is that these sites spread misinformation at an alarming rate that is almost impossible to control thanks to the nature of their business models. Fact-checks do not stop pink slime sites from churning out content, and current laws surrounding misinformation are too obscure to prosecute any of these bad actors. This information comes in at an extremely high-volume rate to local consumers, and may even at times go viral. That misinformation can cause division and tension in com
