Two Colorado cities are targets of AI-generated newsletters from NYC

The news behind the news in Colorado

Jan 31, 2025

*This image, like the newsletters mentioned in this story, was created with AI*

A national network of seemingly local AI-generated newsletters that came under scrutiny from a national media outlet includes at least two in Colorado.

Andrew Deck, who covers generative AI for Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, broke the news on Jan. 27. The headline: “Inside a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting ‘small town America.’”

In the story, the reporter reveals that a man based in New York City is using artificial intelligence tools to run a swarm of local-sounding bot newsletters.

Two of them, Good Day Fort Collins and Good Day Pueblo, are in cities that bookend Colorado’s Front Range.

From the story:

It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”
You wouldn’t know any of that as a subscriber. Separate website domains and distinct newsletter names make it difficult to connect the dots. There is Good Day Rock Springs, Daily Bentonville, Today in Virginia Beach, and Pittsburgh Morning News, to name just a few. Nothing in the newsletter copy discloses that they are part of a national network or that the article curation and summary blurbs are generated using large language models (LLMs).

In an email, Deck said he chose to lead his story with the Fort Collins newsletter because he wanted it to feel grounded somewhere.

“For whatever reason the readership in Fort Collins appeared to be larger, or at least more engaged,” he told me.

The development is another indication of how easy it has become to employ artificial intelligence to create local-seeming news sites from faraway places.

And it shows the importance of doing our own due diligence when coming across an unfamiliar site, a newsletter in our inbox, a new social media account, or piece of content that we might assume is locally produced. Especially if we’re thinking about paying for it.

To that end, the author of the well-reported Nieman Lab story got ahold of the man behind this new suite of aggregation AI newsletters. Doing so took making a $5 reader donation to Good Day Fort Collins, tracing the charge back to a web domain, and figuring out who owned it.

Deck wrote that he was surprised that the operator, a man named Matthew Henderson, was willing to talk when he reached out via email.

“Our goal is to use automation and technology everywhere we possibly can without sacrificing product quality for our readers,” Henderson, a serial internet startup founder, told Deck in an email, adding that he created the technology he uses to send out a flurry of newsletters each day.

His Good Daily newsletters are not providing original reporting, Deck wrote.

Instead, “automated agents” scour the local news in cities and towns, identify relevant stories, “summarize them, edit and approve the copy, format it into a newsletter, and publish,” Deck wrote about the process.

The New York City man behind Good Day Fort Collins and Good Day Pueblo told the reporter he sees his role as actually benefiting local news publishers by sending traffic and eyeballs to their work.

That didn’t sit right with Rodney Gibbs, the head of audience and product at the National Trust for Local News. “His claim is, frankly, horseshit,” Gibbs told Deck for the Nieman Lab piece.

The National Trust owns more than 60 local newspapers in three states, including the two-dozen nonprofit Colorado Community Media papers in the Denver suburbs. Good Daily newsletters “regularly” aggregate their content, Deck wrote.

Here’s more from the story:

Gibbs points out that, in order to operate, AI newsletters rely on human labor at existing local news publishers. Generally, I found, Good Daily links to the handful of operating newsrooms in any given town, including legacy daily newspapers, radio stations, and independent digital outlets. Websites for local news broadcasters were the most common source. In each case, Good Daily could compete with these outlets for local advertising.

And more:

Good Daily makes money from its newsletters in a few ways. For one, readers can contribute to the newsletters directly. A reader donation page offers $5/month and $50/year tiers, with a promised birthday shout out for contributors (though it’s worth noting, Nieman Lab’s faux birthday wasn’t shouted out after a test $5 contribution).
“Producing this free daily newsletter for the Fort Collins community is not an easy job,” reads the call to action. “We are dedicated to keeping Good Day Fort Collins free forever — like local news should be. But that is not without challenge!”

It appears Deck’s exposé on the company has already led some advertisers to pull out, with one company spokesperson telling the author, “After reviewing these newsletters we’ve ended the program with our third-party vendor that included Good Daily.”

Deck also spoke with a local Fort Collins attorney who advertised in the newsletter and indicated the ads appeared to have gotten tens of thousands of views.

Then there’s this:

The peculiarities with Good Daily don’t stop there. Henderson has launched a “give back” program in roughly half of the markets he’s operating in, more than 150 towns and cities. Readers can vote each day for one local nonprofit on the newsletter websites. At the end of the year, each newsletter promises to “donate 10% of our advertising profits” to the organization with the most votes.

One winner last year was the Children’s Speech & Reading Center in Fort Collins.

The organization’s director apparently hadn’t known the center had even won until Deck told her during his reporting for the Nieman Lab story.

She said she reached out to the Good Daily operator and then told Deck what she’d learned: “I did hear back … but they said that they didn’t know what the ‘prize’ would be, that they’d had a rough year financially.”

Asked about that, Henderson told Deck that winners were entitled to 10% of profits and some would be very small or nonexistent. “For markets where we end up not earning a profit, we’ll be working directly with the winners to design creative packages (generous amounts of advertising credits, etc.) to support them this year,” he told the author.

It’s hard to say how popular the two newsletters purportedly serving Fort Collins and Pueblo are, but the story did include this:

A thread on the Fort Collins, Colorado subreddit includes over a dozen residents asking about the newsletter and speculating about how it got ahold of their email addresses. Some were more than happy to receive it.
“It’s the only instance I can think of where spam seems to actually provide value,” reads one comment.
“I haven’t unsubscribed yet because it’s the only local news I get,” reads another.

That Reddit thread was actually one of the first things Deck found in his reporting, he told me, and the first piece of evidence he had that real local residents were subscribed to and reading these newsletters.

“Then I found social posts that showed Fort Collins nonprofits had been leading subscription campaigns for the newsletter prize,” he said. “I worked my way back from there.”

For my part, I first heard about Good Day Pueblo last fall from a resident in that community who indicated he was having trouble figuring out who was behind it.

“It’s pretty basic aggregation,” the person said when I asked if the newsletter was any good.

In October, I emailed its editor seeking to learn more about Good Day Pueblo and asking to talk on the phone. I followed up, and after not hearing back, set it on the back burner, considering the newsletter a questionable endeavor.

Kudos to Andrew Deck for digging deep.

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‘Only the current steward’: San Juan’s ‘Silverton Standard & the Miner’ paper has a new owner

The only newspaper serving San Juan County, with its population of fewer than 1,000, has a new owner.

DeAnne Gallegos, who has lived in the valley for more than a dozen years and is the director of the Silverton Area Chamber of Commerce, bought the weekly Silverton Standard & the Miner earlier this month. The paper prints 400 copies in the winter and double that during the summer tourism boom.

“It’s been around for 150 years and has weathered all sorts of storms within our community,” she said over the phone this week. “The torch was passed to me, and my job is to create viable jobs and to make it a sustainable product.” Then, she said, she will eventually seek to pass the torch to someone else.

The paper was previously owned by Jen Brill, who owned the local ski area Silverton Mountain until 2023. She had bought the paper from the San Juan County Historical Society during the pandemic in 2020. That organization had run the paper since 2009.

Gallegos, who has covered the town and county for the paper for years, said she plans to approach the job of newspaper owner with what she called a “primarily marketing, branding, public relations brain as opposed to being a hard-nosed journalist.”

In a column last week, she told the paper’s readers that the “huge responsibility of acquiring a living relic and community asset” did not escape her.

She added: “I fully understand the importance of not only keeping the newspaper alive but also creating a strategic plan to protect, preserve, and, most importantly, grow this publication.”

Gallegos told readers she intends to keep the current editor and much of the staff.

According to the local historical society’s website, the Silverton Standard & the Miner “has been designated a National Historic Site in Journalism by the Society of Professional Journalists,” making it “the only newspaper in Colorado with such a designation.”

Founded in 1875, it is the oldest continuously operated newspaper — and the oldest business of any kind — on the Western Slope of Colorado, the site adds.

In an interview, Gallegos said she hopes to grow the paper’s digital product and social media presence while attracting new writers. She plans to create an advisory board and is looking for people with a passion for historical newspapers.

Newspaper ownership can come under scrutiny when an owner is involved in any kind of business that might conflict with independent journalism. In Colorado, some newspaper owners are politically active, are local developers, are partisan activists, and have even served in local public office while running a paper in small towns.

As for any potential conflicts with running an independent newspaper while overseeing the local chamber of commerce and having a communications contract with the county’s office of emergency management, Gallegos said the paper has an editor who has in the past rejected and corrected her stories.

“That is important for me as the publisher to continue that balance of voices,” she said.

The Silverton Standard & the Miner has been a for-profit newspaper, a nonprofit newspaper, and back again. Gallegos said she is open to any business model that will sustain it.

“I am only the current steward,” she said, adding, “there has been a long list of voices and owners and philosophies — a hundred and fifty years. It’s just my turn.”

Are Facebook groups filling information gaps in some Colorado communities?

Can a Facebook group in 2025 truly replace a local print newspaper in its heyday?

Across Colorado, people of a certain generation might be turning to Facebook groups and pages in some areas where a longtime local newspaper has closed or has few traditional news outlets.

Last week, reporter Chase McCleary wrote about some of those groups and the people behind them for a story headlined “Reposting vs. reporting: How Facebook groups are replacing shuttered rural newsrooms.”

From the piece:

Karen Hill, the moderator behind The Fountain Valley News Facebook page, experienced the shift to Facebook while she was still working with the Fountain Valley News’ print edition.
Hill started reporting with the 66 year-old weekly paper in 2019, where she and the small family-run publication helped dispel gossip and hearsay from being shared on other Facebook groups.
“You’d get 20 different people saying 20 different things, so we tried to combat that as a local newspaper,” said Hill. “Unfortunately, now that we are essentially gone, that’s pretty much all people have at this point.”
The Fountain Valley News Facebook page had 10,000 followers when it shuttered — over one-third of the town’s population — so Hill decided to keep the page active on a volunteer basis.
Two years later, Hill continues to share events she finds online as well as photos and information shared by other local volunteer photographers, which she said are invaluable to keeping the page online.
However, Hill, who juggles freelance work between caring for four children, is struggling to keep the page going, much less do original reporting like she had for the near two decades she worked as a full-time journalist.

I focused on the above example in Fountain because some of the others mentioned in the story might not technically be operating in areas that have lost local newspapers.

The RMPBS piece highlights a limitation of the Colorado News Mapping Project of which I’m a part and upon which the reporter relied for some information.

Because our methodology identifies local news outlets in counties based on the location of their physical offices, the reporter might not have been aware of newspapers like the Conejos County Citizen and the Mineral County Miner.

Both newspapers, owned by a millennial Wyoming publisher, serve those respective counties but share a physical address in Rio Grande County. I hope we can one day add a coverage area filter to our map to account for that, though it will take more research.

Three of the Facebook group moderators McCleary interviewed “said that as moderators, they are not journalists and do not wish to be journalists. What they do is more curation as opposed to investigative reporting.”

And they “all acknowledged the potential risks and the propensity for many of these pages, if unchecked, to turn into spaces of mass spam, foreign (non-local) advertising and mis- or disinformation.”

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Florence Reporter newspaper gets some national shine

A relatively new Colorado newspaper publisher caught the eye of the Local Media Association this week.

Liz White profiled Kevin Mahmalji of the Florence Reporter in a story for the national nonprofit trade group.

“The leap from community organizer to journalist is pretty short when a community trusts an individual so much that its leaders ask that person to launch a newspaper,” she wrote.

More Colorado media odds & ends

🪦 The Eagle Valley Enterprise weekly newspaper based in Eagle County “folded quietly” on Jan. 9, with just a “small announcement on an ad page,” said its onetime editor Kathy Heicher this week. “It’s been a pleasure serving our community,” read the ad. The paper first published in 1901, said Heicher, who is president of the Eagle County Historical Society and edited the paper in the 1970s and again in the early 2000s.

💨 Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who four years ago co-founded the National Trust for Local News, which owns Colorado Community Media, announced she is stepping down as the organization’s CEO. “Hansen Shapiro’s original idea for the National Trust was to acquire family-owned newspapers that were in danger of falling into the hands of a corporate chain or hedge fund. And she has succeeded, presiding over the purchase of papers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia,” Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy wrote for his Media Nation site.

⚖️ The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is “investigating Denver Public Schools for a Title IX violation after the district converted a girls’ restroom into an all-gender restroom at one of its high schools,” Marissa Solomon reported for 9NEWS in Denver. “A letter notifying the DPS superintendent of the department's investigation cites 9NEWS’ reporting on the restroom change.”

💸 “A state senator is trying again to curb what she has referred to as the ‘abuse’ of the Colorado Open Records Act by certain records requesters,” reported Jeff Roberts of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition. “Similar to a bill that died near the end of the 2024 legislative session, Senate Bill 25-077 gives records custodians extra time to respond to requests made by the public. It lets governments charge ‘the reasonable cost’ associated with filling commercial requests and take up to 30 working days to do so. It also lets them treat multiple CORA requests made by the same person within 14 days as one request — ensuring the requester gets only one free hour before ‘research and retrieval’ charges kick in.”

⛪️ Writing in the Gazette, reporter Debbie Kelley reported that an evangelical filmmaker “predicts that the faith and power of the spiritual revolution that manifests under a mammoth white tent that will seat 7,000 people will revert the Centennial State to Republican domination.”

🗣 Laura Frank, who leads COLab and is the Wolzien Visiting Professor of the Practice at the University of Denver, will deliver the 2025 Wolzien Lecture “on a topic close to her heart: ‘Local Journalism, Higher Education & the Future of Democracy’ Thurs., Feb. 13, Lindsay Auditorium, Room 281, Sturm Hall, 6-7 p.m., preceded by a reception from 5-6 p.m,” an announcement reads. “The event will feature a panel of local journalists and news academics including Colorado Trust for Local News Editor Linda Shapley, Colorado College Journalism Institute Manager Corey Hutchins and University of Colorado Journalism Researcher and Department Chair Patrick Ferrucci, facilitated by Frank.”

📰 Colorado’s past includes the horror of lynchings, and Colorado newspapers “were complicit,” wrote columnist Ari Armstrong in the progressive Colorado Times Recorder digital site.

📝 This newsletter’s reporting got a shoutout in Complete Colorado from Cory Gaines, a Northeastern Junior College physics instructor, who writes occasional columns for the news and commentary arm of the Libertarian-leaning Independence Institute think tank.

🎥 “A Teller County man is suing a Colorado Parks and Wildlife ranger and a sheriff’s deputy after he was arrested while filming the ranger on the side of the road, according to a federal lawsuit,” Katie Langford wrote for the Denver Post.

☀️ Colorado Sun reporter Kevin Simpson wrote about Manitou Springs resident Bob Jackson, whose “1963 photo captured Jack Ruby shooting alleged presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and won him a Pulitzer Prize.” (Appreciate the use of the word alleged here.)

I’m Corey Hutchins, manager of the Colorado College Journalism Institute and a board member of the state Society of Professional Journalists chapter. For nearly a decade I’ve reported on the U.S. local media scene for Columbia Journalism Review, and I’ve been a journalist for longer at multiple news organizations. Colorado Media Project, where I’m an advisor, is underwriting this newsletter, and my “Inside the News” column appears at COLab. (If you’d like to underwrite or sponsor this newsletter hit me up.) Follow me on Bluesky, reply or subscribe to this weekly newsletter here, or e-mail me at CoreyHutchins [at] gmail [dot] com.

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