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For this week’s dart, we turn to CJR’s Riddhi Setty, who has an item that elaborates on the piece she published recently about journalists’ fight over how AI is used in their newsrooms.

To err is human—and it is also machine. At McClatchy, which makes use of an AI-powered proprietary “Content Scaling Agent,” journalists are told that the CSA tool, as it’s known, “does not add, change, or invent facts.” According to an email sent from a labor negotiator working on McClatchy’s behalf to the Sacramento Bee News Guild, “it is designed to support efficiency by allowing journalists to spend more time on original reporting rather than manually creating alternate versions of content.” Lately, the CSA tool has been used to produce alternate versions of stories by McClatchy staffers, reconstituting their reporting in order to target various audiences. But last month—shock!—this resulted in an error.

Using the CSA tool, the Sacramento Bee published an article about sexual assault allegations against Eric Swalwell, who has since resigned from Congress. A sentence in the piece conflated the experiences of different women who had accused Salwell of harming them. As per McClatchy policy, the article had been reviewed by the reporters who worked on the piece it was based on. They missed the mistake—perhaps because, instead of making their workdays more efficient, the introduction of this AI system had created a new layer of work: McClatchy writers must now scrutinize machine-rendered copy and check it against their reporting materials, catching inaccuracies they never would have introduced.

When someone noticed the error, the line was removed. No correction was made—an apparent violation of McClatchy policy. “As part of our normal editing process, our journalists reviewed this article before publication and confirmed it was factual,” Greg Farmer, the executive vice president of local news at McClatchy, said. “A change was made to the article shortly after it was published, as one of our editors believed it was unclear which of four anonymous witnesses a certain statement was attributed to.”

This is not the only time that mistakes, however minor, have slipped through in articles published using the CSA tool at the Sacramento Bee—evening roundups have mixed up the days of the week. Nor is the Bee the only outlet dealing with AI messiness: the New York Times recently had to issue a humiliating correction on a story about Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, that included this admission: “The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned.” 

The Times had no further comment when we reached out about the editor’s note. On Tuesday, however, the paper sent an email to its freelance contributors, reminding them that they “must not submit any material for publication that contains content generated, modified or enhanced by gen-A.I. tools, or that has been input into these tools.” The timing of the message seemed a bit strange, since the Carney piece had been written by the Canada bureau chief. A Times spokesperson said that the letter was not related to recent events: “We regularly provide updated guidance to freelancers and in this case we wanted to be clear about our policies regarding the use of AI.” Eh?

The enshittification of local news sites is upon us. If you’re not familiar with the term, it was first used by Cory Doctorow, a writer and author, in a 2022 piece about the steady degradation of the Amazon shopping experience. Now it is broadly used to describe the increasingly bleak experience of being on the internet. Merriam-Webster defines it as: “when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits.”

Unfortunately, a new report from Judd Legum, the independent journalist behind the Substack Popular Information, reveals that enshittification is exactly what is happening across a network of award-winning newsrooms that have been publishing “thousands of low-quality articles promoting gambling and prediction markets” under the guise of journalism. The publications are all owned by Advance Local, the parent company of The Oregonian, The Star-Ledger, The Patriot-News, and other local outlets across the country. Legum’s analysis shows that Advance Local has published more than seventeen thousand of these gambling pieces—which Legum describes as “gambling slop”—across its sites in less than five years, significantly increasing the volume in 2024. The articles promote sportsbooks, prediction markets, and online casinos. 

In one example, The Patriot-News, which has won a Pulitzer Prize, posted an article with the headline “Kalshi promo code PENNLIVE: UFC 328 Preview,” noting that UFC 328, a mixed martial arts event, was “an awesome opportunity for new users to grab the Kalshi promo code PENNLIVE and get a $10 bonus when they trade $10+.” Very similar articles were then published by The Star-Ledger and the Birmingham News. “When you look at the content, it’s indistinguishable from content that, when published elsewhere, people are very clear is just essentially content marketing and advertising,” Legum told me.  

According to Legum, publications make money from this “gambling slop” either through flat referral fees or, in some arrangements, by receiving a cut of a reader’s eventual gambling losses when they sign up using a promotional code. “One of the challenges in writing the story is to try to make it accessible to people, because it is a relatively complex scheme,” Legum told me. “But I think it is important, because this is just one aspect of this blurring of the line between news and promoting these sportsbooks and prediction markets.”

In response to a request for comment from Legum, Advance Local said it considered the writers who produce the gambling content to be journalists. “I asked, ‘Are the people writing this journalists, and does it meet your editorial standards?’ And they’re really defending this as legitimate journalism, which is kind of hard to believe,” Legum said.

When Black Bear Sports Group, the youth sports arm of a private equity firm, bought Pittsburgh Ice Arena, an executive assured suburban parents in Western Pennsylvania that little would change for their youth hockey teams. The firm “straight-up lied to their faces,” Christine George, the president of North Hills Amateur Hockey, the local youth hockey league, said in an interview with USA Today.

A year later, Black Bear surprised North Hills by offering to buy the league’s teams for a dollar. When the board of North Hills Amateur Hockey, which operates as a nonprofit, refused the deal, the company responded by saying that most of their teams would lose access to ice time at the rink. With few other options, one of their teams shut down after sixty years. “It was heartbreaking. All we wanted to do is keep these kids on the ice, give them something to do, keep them out of trouble. They just don’t care. This was their plan,” George said.

North Hills’ story is just one piece of an impressive nine-month investigation from Kenny Jacoby, a reporter at USA Today, into how Black Bear, founded by a private equity executive named Murry Gunty, has assembled a youth hockey monopoly across the Northeast and Midwest. In less than a decade, Black Bear has acquired forty-seven ice rink facilities across eleven states. The reporting draws on interviews with more than eighty parents, players, coaches, rink operators, and current and former employees.

Rink ownership was just the entry point. Black Bear now controls youth teams, leagues, tournaments, showcases, and even a streaming platform, charging families separately at every step. In the process, the company has displaced a network of community-based nonprofits in favor of a vertically integrated, for-profit system that leaves families with few alternatives. “We’re all paying so much money, and each year, they take away more and more,” a parent from New Jersey told Jacoby.

Gunty addressed concerns about his business practices in an interview for the piece: “I just hope everybody knows that I come from a really good place in trying to deliver a great experience for our families,” he said. But later, he added, “If they don’t like what we’re doing, they can leave.”

The Michigan attorney general’s office recently opened an investigation into Black Bear’s youth‑hockey practices, saying it was “looking into this matter out of concern for the risk of consumer harm—including higher prices and reduced service quality.” Gunty has since resigned as CEO of Black Bear. He also stepped down from his position as the United States Premier Hockey League’s commissioner. Still, his investment firm, Blackstreet Capital Holdings, remains in control of both organizations.

Hat tip to Michelle Cyca, bureau chief at The Narwhal, for flagging the Times correction on Bluesky. If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.

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