In late July, a new website popped online carrying local news stories from Georgia.
There was an article about a disgraced former Atlanta City Council member, another about President Donald Trump’s visit to Cobb County, and one about Georgia coach Kirby Smart.
Read more about the local news industry on Rough Draft.
The stories were copied and pasted from other journalism sites, including Capitol Beat, and carried the original authors’ bylines, with links to the original publications.
But two pieces with no bylines have appeared on the Peach State Post’s website.
Both attack Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff for his votes against Republican tax initiatives.
Then, there is another new website with a shared interest in publishing local news but with a divergent take on partisan politics.
It carried articles about Flock Safety cameras and a data center proposed in Columbia County, both originally published by USA Today Network properties and shared via Reuters Connect.
Courier Georgia
The site, called Courier Georgia, launched in May with one correspondent and features her original articles. Her reporting covers topics that are priorities for Democratic politicians, such as Medicaid expansion and the social media posts by the son-in-law of U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican running to unseat Ossoff in November.
The Courier also runs unbylined videos, with one featuring Collins walking away from a news conference about his son-in-law as Collins’ guards block the videographer following him. Another shows Ossoff calling Trump a “draft-dodging crook president.”
Both news sites have something in common besides being new: they’re run by people with partisan ties.
Peach State Post
The Peach State Post site discloses it is paid for by One Nation.
It is part of a “fake news network” and Republican dark money, according to an article on a Substack site called Popular Information.
The article, published in early August, reported that One Nation was a dark money group that had given more than $70 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans. And it said One Nation had started six news sites in states with key U.S. Senate races, including Georgia.
Judd Legum, the author, was a campaign researcher for Hillary Clinton who switched to independent publishing.
Legum said in an interview that in addition to tracking campaign contributions, he linked One Nation to the GOP Senate fund through technical methods, such as the tracking pixels on their websites.
An article published in July by Axios quoted an anonymous source who said One Nation’s executive director had said in a conference call with GOP donors and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that the group would be spending about $100 million against Democratic Senate incumbents in Georgia and two other states.
The Peach State Post and One Nation websites do not list contact information. A request for comment left by Capitol Beat on One Nation’s web contact portal in mid-August yielded no response.
State party reactions
Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon did not respond to text messages asking about Peach State Post.
“I personally doubt that they’re involved,” Legum said. “I think that this is an extension of the super PAC and One Nation spending.”
Courier Georgia is part of the Courier Newsroom, which is owned by Good Information, Inc.
The Courier sites list Tara McGowan as publisher of Courier Georgia and as publisher and CEO of Courier Newsroom. The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization, identifies McGowan as the founder of Good Information.
The news site Notus reported in 2024 that McGowan was a Democratic operative who had pitched the Courier in a 2019 memo as an answer to GOP and right-wing investment in digital media. Axios reported in 2021 that Good Information was launching with millions of dollars in seed money from wealthy left-leaning donors, including Reid Hoffman and George Soros.
The Georgia Democratic Party said it had no comment, but Courier Newsroom responded in writing to an email asking about the organization’s reported partisan links.
What do the companies say?
“Every day, our award-winning reporters, editors, and social teams tell the stories shaping people’s lives — from Medicaid cuts and ICE raids to education battles,” wrote Mariela Rosario, the Courier Newsroom state managing director.
The email touted Courier’s presence on TikTok and said the network had an audience of millions and planned to have 20 newsrooms by year’s end.
“As local news disappears in too many places, we’re proving independent, values-driven journalism can grow without sacrificing credibility,” Rosario wrote.
Courier Georgia and Peach State Post started publishing in Georgia ahead of an election that could help decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.
The academic view
Both sandwich real news around what journalism expert Karin Assmann described as political advertorials.
“It’s political branded content hiding behind real news, so it’s just muddying the waters,” said Assmann, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s journalism school.
Assmann and Burton Speakman, an associate professor at Kennesaw State University, collaborated on a research article published in June that examined websites posing as news outlets while promoting a partisan worldview.
The industry term, they wrote, is “pink slime,” a metaphor ripped from headlines over a decade ago about the food-industry term for ammonia-treated beef trimmings.
It applies to digital sites masquerading as news, they wrote, because both the meat and the sites are slippery and hard to digest.
Assmann said the two new news entrants in Georgia look more sophisticated.
“It is more subtle than obvious propaganda, like an advertorial with political messaging disguised as news to encourage people to believe it — and without disclosing whose money is behind the message,” she said. “It’s actually a political ad, and it should be marked as such.”
‘Of course it is’ propaganda
Speakman, when asked if he thought Peach State Post was propaganda, sighed.
“Well, yeah. Of course it is. I mean, it’s being funded by One Nation,” he said. “The Peach State Post is trying to use legitimate news sources’ articles to provide them some credibility for the other stuff that they’re trying to slide in.”
Speakman called it “an advancement of the technique” used by the 30 sites in Georgia that he and Assmann characterized as pink slime in their paper.
But Speakman said the Post and the Courier, which were too new to have made it into their paper, are also misleading readers.
“They’re trying to legitimize themselves by using mainstream sources to manipulate the public into having a worse understanding of what’s going on in politics in the world,” he said.
Both Speakman and Assmann said that mixing partisan messaging with republished reporting was a dangerous development for democracy.
But Speakman thought the new projects would be short-lived, particularly those operated by One Nation.
“Unless there’s some sort of unforeseen runoff in one of these six states, those six sites are going to disappear,” he said. “They only bought their web domains, each of the web domains, for one year.”
As for the Courier properties, Speakman said Democratic media projects have often struggled to attract sustained funding.
“The history of liberal and progressive media sticking around has not been good historically,” he said. “Air America fizzled out, most of the liberal talk radio fizzled out.”
