Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

Two days after the 2024 elections, Metric Media, the online publishing company, started filing thousands of public records requests. Metric, which operates a network of nearly twelve hundred news sites, sent letters to the governments of every city, town, and village in the state of Wisconsin—one thousand, one hundred, and fourteen requests in all. Every one asked for the same thing: a list of voters who had registered on Election Day.

“As a media organization, we are involved in gathering and reporting news to the public. Access to public records is essential for us to fulfill our professional responsibilities, which include holding public institutions accountable and providing transparency to the public,” NE Wisconsin News, a Metric website, wrote. The request also sought a fee waiver typically reserved for press outlets.

But Metric Media is not a traditional news company. Its network, which includes websites with innocuous-sounding names—such as the Chicago City Wire and Ohio’s Buckeye Reporter—has been accused of plagiarism and using fake bylines. The sites are designed to appear legitimate, but they are partisan outlets masquerading as local news—what is sometimes referred to as “pink slime” journalism.

Founded in 2019, Metric has been criticized for jury tampering and tied to pay-for-play political schemes and fake newspapers that land in mailboxes ahead of key elections. Recently, it has focused on obtaining troves of public records. In the past year, an investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism has found Metric filed more than nine thousand Freedom of Information Act requests across all fifty states. 

Many of the requests are for data at the forefront of America’s culture-wars, from allegedly rigged elections to banned books to transgender inmates. With public records in hand, Metric has targeted liberal politicians with negative reporting, criticized the funding of nonprofit organizations, and published personally identifying details about small-town residents who spoke up at school board hearings. Unlike traditional journalism, Metric’s stories do not air dueling perspectives or offer targets a chance to comment. 

Brian Timpone, one of the founders of Metric Media, disputed Tow’s FOIA count, saying, “We have sent far more FOIAs than that.” He did not respond to a list of detailed questions. Metric’s other founders, Dan Proft and Bradley Cameron, did not respond to requests for comment.

Metric’s strategy fits squarely within a growing effort by conservative think tanks and even the Department of Justice to use public records laws to gain access to voter information and school curricula under the auspices of transparency. “Anybody can file a FOIA request,” Jason R. Baron, a professor of the practice at the University of Maryland’s College of Information, said. “There is nothing in the FOIA law that would differentiate a pay-for-play or some shell-game entity from a more reputable media organization.”

Some critics worry that releasing records such as voter rolls, which can include personal data, amounts to a major breach of privacy and can lead to blatant targeting of individuals. But experts who advocate for stronger FOIA laws worry that placing any limits on requesters could be chilling for all members of the public. “I think quickly this gets you into a very broad, philosophical question about: What do we consider to be news, and what do we not? And who gets to answer that question?” Matt Topic, an Illinois-based FOIA lawyer at Loevy & Loevy, said. “Do we want the government answering that question?” 

That’s also the perspective of Edward Weinhaus, a lawyer for Metric and a cofounder of two of its predecessors, which largely operated together: Blockshopper LLC and Journatic, later known as LocalLabs. He says all public records should be fair game. “I do not care what you’re asking for. I do not care what you’re using the information for. If it’s public, it’s yours and it’s all of ours. Let’s go get it,” Weinhaus said in an interview.

Politics Versus Privacy

In January of 2025, Kwame Raoul, the attorney general of Illinois, settled a lawsuit against a Lake Forest, Illinois–based publishing company for illegally posting the birth dates and home addresses of hundreds of thousands of voters. The information was reportedly sourced from the state board of elections and obtained through two registered political action committees. The data included addresses for dozens of state and federal judges, whose places of residence are protected under Illinois law. The organization that published the information was Local Government Information Services (LGIS), which is affiliated with Metric Media.

Metric co-founder Timpone is a former broadcast news reporter with a long history of establishing publishing companies that utilize “proprietary technology to transform public records into news.” LGIS is a collaboration between Timpone and Proft, who ran, unsuccessfully, as a Republican candidate for governor of Illinois in 2009 and later operated a political action committee called People Who Play by the Rules. The PAC received more than forty-two million dollars from Richard Uihlein, the founder of Uline and a major conservative donor. The Illinois attorney general determined that Proft’s PAC had leaked some voter rolls to Metric papers.

It wasn’t the first time Proft had collaborated with candidates. In 2016, the Illinois elections board determined that another of his PACs had paid for fake newspapers filled with political content that had been coordinated with candidates. The PAC was ordered to identify itself in future publications; instead, it stopped funding them.

The latest settlement required Timpone and Proft to destroy any restricted voter data, but did not fine the company or force LGIS to admit to wrongdoing. Nor did it stop Metric, which throughout 2025 requested similar caches of public records and posted some of the results on its websites.

For example, in May and June, Metric papers asked four Illinois counties to release detailed voter records including “each voter’s full name, residential and mailing addresses, voter identification number if applicable, date of birth, phone number and email address if available, party affiliation where relevant, voting history including elections participated in and methods used for voting, as well as their current voter status.”

In January and September, they asked five hundred and seventy-three sheriffs’ departments across fourteen states to release records of arrests, including: “name, sex, race, age, date of birth, and citizenship status of each arrestee.” They also asked for booking photos and names of arresting officers.

In November, various Metric papers sent requests to one hundred and seventy-seven police departments across nine states for information about their police rosters, including name, rank, gender, age, and payroll records.

Because public records are filed by agency and county and there is no unified public records library across states or the country, it’s hard to determine how many of the requests were fulfilled.

Automated FOIAs

LGIS and Metric operate within a network of media companies that frequently change names and websites. Five companies make up the core of the network, according to previous Tow Center research: Metric; LGIS; Pipeline Media; Locality Labs; and Newsinator, which, according to Iowa records, is sometimes called Franklin Archer.

Timpone has been open about the fact that the network uses AI to write stories. “Yes, we use artificial intelligence to produce news. It doesn’t mean it’s some magic. We are collecting source information and just replacing the writing part of the process with software,” he said at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Montreal this past June. “There’s a demand for something new, and free speech is a good thing, period.”

Speaking on a panel called “AI, Truth & Power: Who Controls the Narrative?,” Timpone described Metric as a savior of local news and civic discourse. “Remember those newspapers you used to get at the house when you were a kid that reported on weddings, anniversary parties, the city council and honor roll and the boys who went away to the military? Well, those are gone, and as a result, we have less community. We’re less civil to each other because of it,” Timpone told the crowd. “We have built technology that has built that kind of news.”

The Tow Center found that Metric published more than 1.3 million stories in 2025; by comparison, the Associated Press publishes roughly 459,000 stories a year. Timpone said his goal is to expand Metric’s network to ten thousand websites.

When asked about previous reporting on Metric’s coverage, especially of elections, Timpone blamed the media. “We’ve gotten a lot of criticism, it’s mostly been by other media—they are our competition and they see [us] as a threat, so of course they are trying to find reasons they don’t like it,” he said. 

“They have questions about our motives or our funding. Look, the New York Times doesn’t disclose their funding, and they have partisan views of the world,” he continued at the conference. “If you are disagreeing with what we publish, publish something different and make a better argument.”

A Small-Town Paper?

For most of its existence, Metric has leaned on AI and public records as a way to fill its thousands of pages. Its sites contain filler articles on high school sports stats, Sunday church schedules, and local gas prices. Few have bylines, and the ones that do often use fake names.

A large portion of the public records requests filed by Metric papers could be considered fishing—requests that ask for huge amounts of data, such as the emails from every Illinois mayor for the past thirty days. Agencies can reject such requests for being overly broad; they are sometimes outright ignored by record custodians for being “vexatious” under state law.

But in the past year, Metric’s FOIA requests have also focused on the kind of hot-button topics that reinforce conservative talking points and turn school board meetings into screaming matches. Most have also zeroed in on one place: Metric’s home state of Illinois. 

Nearly 50 percent of Metric’s FOIAs in 2025 were for information filed in Illinois, according to Tow’s analysis. The requests appear much more detailed and specific than those filed in other states and counties. For example, between January and the beginning of December of 2025, Metric requested the current number of transgender and nonbinary inmates housed at an Illinois corrections center and arrest records from Chicago’s Pride parade. In June, Metric asked for all contracts between the Illinois State Board of Education and the American Institutes for Research, a government contractor that tracks national school performance and that has been accused of wasteful spending by the conservative American Enterprise Institute and Elon Musk. 

Metric also filed records requests to every sheriff’s office in Illinois—eighty-four in total—seeking details about county jail inmates with so-called immigration detainers—requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement that the inmates be released to ICE—issued in the past year. A day later, the Chicago City Wire published a story about Brandon Johnson, the mayor, with the headline: “Mayor Johnson faces heat from two sides over promise to protect illegals from deportation.” 

The article quoted Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a right-wing activist group, saying that Johnson “announced himself and his city government to be outlaws on illegal immigration as they plan to help illegal aliens resist the rule of law.” Judicial Watch is known for its own prolific use of FOIA requests and resulting lawsuits to target Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton. It operates with the motto: “Because no one is above the law.” Metric and Judicial Watch share donors, including DonorsTrust, which Mother Jones called the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.”

“There is fear because I’m conservative, and I am, but it doesn’t mean I can’t be objective and fair,” Timpone said at the June conference in Montreal. Even so, he added, “it might be true that the conservative voice is heard more, because they are not heard more by the mainstream media in the United States.”

Support in GOP Circles

Metric does not disclose its backers, but its affiliated nonprofit, now called the Community News Foundation, received ten million dollars in donations in 2024. That’s up from six million the previous year, according to the most recently available tax filings. 

Companies in Metric’s network took millions during the 2022 election cycle from conservative-leaning PACs, including seven and a half million dollars from two PACs and Restoration of America, a nonprofit backed by Uihlein. Timpone is also described as the founder of the Voter Reference Foundation—an organization run by Doug Truax, a conservative political activist, that uses FOIAs to obtain voter rolls. Metric has run stories derived from VoteRef press releases. 

Metric shares donors with conservative think tanks, including the Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation spin-off that calls itself “a nonpartisan independent watchdog” exposing waste and corruption. Both the Community News Foundation and the Oversight Project have received funds from DonorsTrust.

Illinois DOGE

We know about most of Metric’s FOIAs because it writes about them on its websites. The company also posts when it receives public records with noteworthy information. That’s how we know the network targeted a handful of Illinois-based nonprofits last year as part of a series titled “Illinois DOGE.” 

The Illinois papers described the DOGE series as profiles of “Illinois ‘non-profit’ organizations that receive all or an overwhelming majority of their funding from government/taxpayers to provide services the state also provides.” It framed the featured organizations as politically liberal and a waste of taxpayer investment. Headlines for profiles in the Chicago City Wire included: “Centro De Trabajadores Unidos gets $4 million to help illegal aliens evade ICE” and “$1.5 million to the Chicago Therapy Collective to advocate for cross-dressing.” Other profile subjects included a nonprofit called TMH Mancave that provides mental health support to Black men; a group called the Indo-American Center that serves South Asian immigrants; and the Illinois Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. 

Metric copublished the DOGE series with Breakthrough Ideas, a website run by Jeanne Ives, formerly a Republican state representative in Illinois, who describes her site as “a policy advocacy and education network that advances the causes of peace, prosperity, and freedom.”

According to the Prairie State Wire, a Metric paper, members of the Illinois General Assembly’s conservative Illinois Freedom Caucus referred to reporting from the series during a conference this past May, where they discussed unnecessary grants to NGOs and nonprofits and mentioned the Indo-American Center by name. 

A Fight in Metric’s Backyard

Timpone owns a home in Oak Brook, a majority-Democratic district about a twenty-minute drive from Chicago. We know this because both Blockshopper and the West Cook News, a Metric site, published his address when he purchased the house, in 2021, for more than 1.6 million dollars. “All my neighbors hate me,” he said at the June panel in Montreal. “They don’t agree with me, and I think that’s also emblematic of how we’ve become less civil as people. If you met me and talked to me, you wouldn’t think I was so bad. But part of the reason that we don’t know our neighbors is because we read this top-down news, this narrative of ‘us versus them.’”

Timpone said that he wants to use his media conglomerate to unite communities across political lines, and that doing so means focusing on local subjects: “What’s pushed to us is this top-down divisiveness, and I’m against that,” he said at the conference. “You don’t have to believe me, but I’m more interested in high school sports than I am in politics at the community level.”

But an analysis of Metric’s coverage of Oak Brook tells a different story. In the past year, two of its papers—the DuPage Policy Journal and Prairie State News—have waded into a fiery war of words over the town’s school board and parks district, at times attacking local parents by name.

Metric papers have zeroed in on a battle over school curricula waged primarily by Kristina McCloy, a former Chicago Bulls cheerleader turned Trump surrogate who was appointed as a Downers Grove Township trustee in 2023, but no longer holds political office. McCloy started Concerned Parents of Hinsdale in 2024 to voice her objections to a book called Julian Is a Mermaid, which she said pushed “woke gender ideology on our children.” That summer, she claimed, in a post to a private Facebook group, that schools were “downplaying” attacks by Black children on white children, including in her school district in Hinsdale, a small village of roughly seventeen thousand residents.

Metric papers have given McCloy and her group a large microphone. They published at least twenty-three articles about her and her group, now called Concerned Parents of Illinois, sometimes quoting McCloy on issues ranging from homelessness to transportation.

Concerned Parents of Illinois has been represented by Judicial Watch—the very same right-wing activist group Metric quoted in its stories chastising Chicago’s mayor and his immigration policies. Judicial Watch received more than ninety-eight million dollars in contributions in 2024, according to its most recent tax filings. It says it spent 13.3 million dollars to monitor and investigate “the actions of federal, state and local government entities and public officials typically using open records laws.” Last year, Metric published at least fourteen stories that mention Judicial Watch by name.

Targeting Local Parents

In September, McCloy said her group had forced the school district to create an “opt out” policy that allows parents to limit their children’s access to certain books, though the district later said her claims were exaggerated.

One local parent who objected to McCloy’s interventions was Will Haskell, a father of three who likened McCloy’s group to “stochastic terrorism” at a consolidated school district hearing in September. A month later, Haskell learned that Judicial Watch had filed public records requests seeking any emails he’d sent to local lawmakers. 

Haskell felt targeted, and he said so at the next school district meeting, in October. The following month, the DuPage Policy Journal published an article calling him a “Democratic activist.” The story relied heavily on McCloy, who told the paper: “Will hijacks public meetings in districts he doesn’t even live in, spewing gibberish and resorting to childish name-calling.”

Haskell is a healthcare executive who lives in Hinsdale. He said that he’s far from an activist—he’s only voted in one presidential election in his life. “My kids obviously go to school in District 181, and over the last few years, there have been new attempts to interfere with the school,” Haskell told me. “More than forty parents came out and spoke in opposition to the concerned-parents group and to Kristina McCloy herself, and I was one of them.”

He said he took issue with McCloy’s group insinuating that it was speaking for all parents. “They are only looking to protect the rights of certain parents,” he said. Haskell said McCloy wasn’t at either hearing where he testified. He said friends warned him that speaking up would draw unwanted attention, but it ended up being more than he’d bargained for. “Since then, I have been doxed. My family is receiving threats, my employer is receiving threats,” he said. “Never mind the fact that those articles that you read are from DuPage Policy Journal, which is a pink-slime organization with a history of sending out mailers and other material that are disguised to look like legitimate newspapers, but much of the information contained within them is conjecture. It’s a gross overstatement. It’s just misleading, false information.” McCloy and Judicial Watch did not respond to requests for comment.

The school district did send Judicial Watch responsive emails for its FOIA on Haskell, but they were heavily redacted. A later DuPage Policy Journal article, however, cited and linked to emails Haskell had sent to another local department—the Oak Brook Park District—in which he criticized suggestions that the park district’s facilities should be closed to kids outside the district. “The real issue is that some residents object to paying taxes, while feeling entitled to unrestricted use of public buildings and amenities. They expect others to subsidize their lifestyle, and use the term ‘non-resident’ as a dog whistle for people outside their social class,” he wrote in the published emails.

“Haskell has developed a reputation in DuPage county for political activism and has frequently clashed with conservative residents and officials,” the DuPage Policy Journal article said, linking back to the November article quoting McCloy.

Haskell said Metric never reached out to him for comment; he’s asked them to remove photos of him, which he says they copied from his LinkedIn profile. So far, he said, he’s received no response.

Andrea Flynn was another vocal parent who became the target of a FOIA that sparked online attacks after she wrote a letter to the editor that was published in January of 2025 in The Hinsdalean, a local Illinois paper. She said she wrote the letter after joining the Concerned Parents of Hinsdale Facebook group and seeing their perspective on the LGBTQ+ community. 

“I was pretty quickly appalled by a lot of the posts,” Flynn told me. “I got fed up, and I wrote an article.”

“My message to the Concerned Parents of Hinsdale: Please stop. Our young people have enough to manage,” Flynn wrote in the letter. “Business leaders: If you support the Concerned Parents of Hinsdale, I will not support you. And maybe I’ll use the money I save to buy a good ‘gay’ book.”

Two months later, the Prairie State Wire filed a FOIA request to the Village of Hinsdale and its police department seeking all records on Flynn. It’s unclear if it received anything.

Flynn said she was unaware of the FOIA request until I told her about it. After her letter was published, she said, the Concerned Parents of Illinois Facebook page became rife with attacks on her. Many criticized her role as a volunteer for a foundation that raises money for the school district. One suggested FOIAing the police department for any arrest records that named her. 

Flynn intended to spark a reaction with the letter. “I wanted them to stop. I felt like the stuff they were saying was really, really mean. Like calling youth ‘tranny boys,’ which I found really offensive,” she said.

But Flynn didn’t expect to be personally attacked for standing up for the school’s curriculum. “I’m just a normal person living my life,” she said. “I’m not trying to be famous.”

C.J. Robinson contributed to this article.

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to correctly identify Richard Uihlein, Jeanne Ives, and Loevy & Loevy.

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.