Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.

Just days ahead of the 2024 presidential election, local “news” network and progressive political campaign vehicle Courier Newsroom’s homepage featured an article outlining political ad spending in the final weeks before polling day. It highlighted Elon Musk–backed groups Future Coalition PAC and Progress 2028, which have been running ads boosting Donald Trump, microtargeting voters, and spreading misinformation about Kamala Harris’s policy platform. 

The article warned that “last-minute anonymous groups have come out of the woodwork to persuade voters online.” What it does not mention is that one of the biggest political advertisers on Meta’s platforms is Courier Newsroom itself.

Courier “newsrooms” collectively spent more than $6 million in October 2024. Combined, they are the third highest spender on political ads on Meta, compared with other individual spenders pulled from the Meta Ad Library Report. That’s more than double the amount the Musk-backed America PAC spent on Meta ads and trailing only the Harris and Trump campaigns themselves. By investing large amounts of money in political ads, Courier is continuing a strategy of microtargeting voters to boost voter turnout in a way that benefits the left, using local news as an engagement strategy. Its tactics are part of a wider movement that blurs the line between political campaigning and journalism.

We asked Anna Brugmann, director of policy at Rebuild Local News, about the large ad spend by the network. “Do you know of any other newsrooms that have $6 million?” Brugmann said, referring to Courier’s ad spending in October. While this kind of spending might be typical for political advertising, it is a budget far beyond the reach of most local newsrooms. Courier’s pattern of spending in the 2024 election cycle also raises inevitable questions about funding sources and demonstrates to what extent the network is a campaigning tool rather than local journalism.

Courier Newsroom originally emerged from ACRONYM, a nonprofit founded by Tara McGowan, a former Democratic political strategist and founder of a parallel Democrat-aligned super-PAC called PACRONYM. The company runs eleven local “news” sites strategically placed in swing states, such as The Keystone in Pennsylvania, Cardinal & Pine in North Carolina, and The ’Gander in Michigan. Its 2024 ad spending is concentrated in these three states. Interestingly, Courier Newsroom does not operate in Georgia, where right-wing paid partisan “pink slime” publications like Metric Media’s Peach Tree Times have recently been active. Courier also has “newsrooms” in Texas, Florida, and Virginia—but there is no evidence of its spending any money promoting Facebook or Instagram ads in those states. 

Roughly $4 million of Courier’s final ad blitz on Meta was spent during the week of October 20—the final days that new political ads could be purchased on Meta, according to data we analyzed from the Meta Ad Library.

To combat misinformation about the election results, Meta has banned new political ads in the final week before the election, but some ads purchased before the deadline can continue to be shown. Before the final cutoff date for launching political ads, Courier spent around $2.4 million on over 400 ads that will continue to run during the election. These ads are being shown to voters during the pivotal days when polls are open, while most other political ads are put on snooze.

Courier’s origins are that of a political campaigning vehicle, but the company has adopted the same tactic as other paid partisan networks. Its website identifies it as a news outlet that produces factual “pro-democracy news” from the left and claims adherence to journalistic principles like editorial independence. But in addition to promoting news articles that support progressive talking points, the network runs explicitly political ads.

One, for example, recruits participants to a program that claims they can receive up to $400 for talking to their family and friends about “voting for Kamala Harris and Democrats this election cycle.” Relentless, the organization mentioned in the ad, was cofounded by Greta Carnes, previous senior director of organizing at ACRONYM, the nonprofit that originally launched Courier. Ads like this ran in four states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and Arizona—with a total ad spend of between $25,000 and $30,000. Many are still active going into Election Day.

While many ads do link to articles from Courier’s outlets, many do not. Another ad paid for by one of Courier’s newsrooms shows an unnamed woman speaking on Harris’s policy agenda with the 82-page document in the backdrop. The ad didn’t link to any editorial content from Courier Newsroom’s outlets. Instead, it encourages viewers to go to Harris’s official website: “Kamala Harris has a plan and you can read about it.” Claire Heddles, a reporter for NOTUS, also reported similar ads, placed by Courier on Snapchat, including one that she wrote looked identical to an official Harris campaign ad and directed users to her campaign website.

Ads also targeted key demographics for Democrats in swing states. For pages like The Keystone and Cardinal & Pine, the ad library shows Courier used custom lists to target all campaigns to specific audiences based on information like email, phone numbers, and physical addresses. The source of these lists is not available in the ad library. Ads for The Keystone, Courier’s Pennsylvania arm, reached more women than men. Many of their ads focused on reproductive rights. One ad, for example, features filmmaker and journalist Allan Piper stating “when they say [Trump] is coming after birth control, we need to believe them.”  

We found a similar pattern of ads reaching women more than men across most of the Courier outlets.

Seven of The Keystone’s ads exclusively targeted men in Pennsylvania. While these ads cost The Keystone only between $12,000 and $17,000, a minuscule fraction of its roughly $2 million budget, the ads that were targeted exclusively at men in Pennsylvania seemed to contain messages for Black male voters specifically, like “Where’s Trump’s policy for black men?” or “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men.” 

It’s not unusual for newsrooms to run ads, but it is unusual when they’re as explicitly political and targeted as Courier’s. “Local news might advertise its own newsroom, but it’s not going to take out advertisements to reinforce a particular issue or a particular candidate,” Brugmann said. Tow Center has been tracking microtargeting by Courier and other partisan networks for years.

In the last month of the election cycle, the biggest individual ad spends from Courier seem to be aimed at getting its target audience to the polls. 

In October, 35 of the 48 Meta ads, which cost at least $30,000 each, directed users to voting resources, often linking to guides included on each newsroom’s website. These ads cost the newsrooms at least $1.5 million in total. 

While these ads aren’t always overtly political, much of the final blitz is geared at getting the progressive audience that Courier has built out to the polls. Many ads link directly to each site’s “Voting Guide,” but some funnel Meta users to the Good Information Foundation’s Voting and Elections Hub, providing voter information once a user enters their email and physical address.

“What these outlets are doing is trading on the trust of local newsrooms,” says Brugmann.

McGowan, the founder of Courier Newsroom, said in a 2019 interview to Bloomberg that many of her critics would see her media company as “an affront to journalistic integrity” because it’s not balanced. But she argued that “balance does not exist anymore” and that without “new innovative models for journalism” the information war is lost to “verified liars pouring millions of dollars into Facebook.”

But the issue is not so much the lack of balance. While the network’s ties to Democratic PACs upon its founding were well documented, its current funding structure isn’t well understood, either by readers or by outside observers.

In 2021, Good Information Inc., a public benefit corporation owned by McGowan, acquired Courier; its funding has since been largely unavailable to the public, with the exception of a few investors Courier lists on its website. The following year, the Federal Election Commission unanimously rejected a conservative nonprofit’s complaint that Courier Newsroom failed to identify as a political committee. Though the law does not define “press entity” or “media entity,” the commission stated that Courier cannot be a political committee, falls under press exemption, and does not need to disclose or report any expenditures. 

“They’re a B Corp, and so they don’t have the same sorts of transparency and reporting that nonprofits do,” said Brugmann. “Well, that’s kind of the issue, isn’t it?”

At the time of publication, Courier did not return Tow’s request for comment.   

Pink Slime?

Courier isn’t the only paid partisan news network running Meta Ads, but of all the networks Tow Center tracks, it is spending by far the most. Tow Center mentioned the network in its January report titled “Pink Slime”: Partisan Journalism and the Future of Local News. 

Courier rejects the idea that it is a low-quality “pink slime” network—and in some ways it is right. Courier differs from content networks like Metric Media, a sprawling right-wing agglomeration of almost 1,300 websites that masquerade as local news and are populated primarily by inane templated, auto-generated articles, usually without bylines, usually interspersed with political content intended to promote specific political agendas.

“To discuss Courier Newsroom in the same breath as pink slime journalism is not necessarily to equate the two—at least not directly. There are tangible differences,” the report argues. Courier generates content written by real authors who are often based in the states where they operate. It even allowed the Tow Center access to observe The ’Gander’s operations in Michigan in 2022. 

But the report argues that it is appropriate to mention them together because Courier “has persistently attracted questions about, for example, its transparency around its structure, backing, and historical ties to dark money groups; its entanglement with the political establishment; heavy use of microtargeting to reach specific segments of the electorate with ads said to blur the lines between political advocacy and news; and a lack of transparency around how those ads are funded.”

Whoever their funders are in 2024, Courier has deep pockets. It has consistently outspent other partisan paid “news” networks on Meta, which is one of the few places where ad-spending data is available. Metric Media’s tactics also rely less on targeted digital advertising, and include delivering deceptive physical newspapers in some areas, in comparison with Courier, which is strongly focused on social media ad targeting.

The ongoing focus on “pink slime publications” comes at a time when initiatives are looking to revive local newsrooms in the US through a mixture of philanthropic action and policy changes. Last month, Press Forward—a national initiative to strengthen local news—announced that it will hand out $20 million to hundreds of newsrooms across the US (part of a broader initiative by Press Forward to get $500 million into local news). And in California, legislation is in the works to force tech giants to pay for a portion of advertising profits. Meta, however, has been pushing back against such initiatives; last year, the company blocked access to news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadians in order to avoid paying sums to news publishers. And yet Meta hasn’t hesitated to allow networks like Courier to pay it to publish political advertisements. 

Observers have often questioned the effectiveness of the partisan paid approach, especially when attached to high-volume, low-quality content. But Courier Newsroom uses a somewhat elevated strategy, one that includes pushing better-resourced content to its audience, testing the effectiveness of certain talking points beforehand, and spending heavily on digital targeted advertising. The increased spending through the network this election cycle points to the Democratic campaigning apparatus, at least for now, seeing the strategy as effective.

Whether this actually turns out to be an effective strategy—and whether parties double down on this tactic over promoting AI-generated junk news in future races—is something we’ll have better insight into after Election Day on Tuesday. But, if they do double down, this may further enrage those trying to save local news.

As Todd Shepherd, an investigative reporter who has written about The Keystone for Broad + Liberty—a local nonprofit news outlet covering Pennsylvania and parts of New Jersey—told Tow Center in an interview, “I find it obscene that an outlet like [Courier] asks their readers for $10 and $20 contributions when they’re running million-dollar Facebook campaigns like this, like they’re asking their readers to support their ‘journalism.’” 

Brugmann of Rebuild Local News was also left asking, “What could that $6 million have done if it was dedicated to local quality journalism?”

Methodology

We used two data sources for our story. First, we pulled ad-level data from a third-party copy of the Meta Ad Library’s political ads that was made publicly available on GitHub. Our authors were unable to obtain access to the official ad library API. To find pages, we searched the data for the partisan local “news” networks that Tow Center has been following: Courier Newsroom, Local Report, Metric Media, Star News, and American Independent networks, if they had any spending in the past ninety days (as of November 3, 2024). We also searched for individual Courier newsrooms that did not mention Courier in their ad metadata. To get total spending, we summed the minimum spend for each ad campaign provided by the dataset, so our estimates will be conservative. We based time frames on the day an ad first appeared on Meta.

The comparison table with the Trump and Harris campaigns was pulled from the Meta Ad Library Report. We summed any page name funded by Harris for President or the Harris Victory Fund as one category, and any funders for the Donald J. Trump page or from ​​Trump National Committee JFC as well as ads from the various Courier newsrooms.

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