Tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s vision for journalism is chilling

Given his role in bleeding out Gawker like humanely slaughtered cattle, there’s some irony in tech billionaire Peter Thiel funding a group of newspapers.

I mean, we guess that’s what you’d call them — a publication like Grand Canyon Times, delivered unsolicited to residents in parts of Arizona critical to the coming mid-terms, resembles a paper but one put together by aliens who have access to cut-and-paste and deeply conservative views after they have made a brief and inexact study of human communication.

So the paper is both riddled with errors, like a series of profiles on local football players accompanying photos of other people, and padded out with press releases and stories suspiciously likely to favour Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. When baffled readers look a bit closer, they can see the disclaimer that this is paid for by the “Saving Arizona PAC”. The PAC has received more than $13 million from Thiel.

It’s not even clear if the Grand Canyon Times has an office in the state it purports to cover, but that wouldn’t be a major surprise — it’s an affiliate of Metric Media, a network of 1300 “local papers” operated by Brian Timpone, who has previously argued a local paper need not be all that local.

Timpone has run a series of companies like Metric Media which, over the years, have been subject to all sorts of claims, such as plagiarism, articles written by algorithm, or “local” journalism outsourced to freelancers based in the Philippines. Timpone has also said he believes his companies’ approach was “saving journalism”.

Over the past decade, we have seen wealthy populists attempt, with mixed results, to parlay their wealth and profile into political office — as actual newsrooms continue to contract, how long before one of them ventures into a similarly blurred mix of political advertising and print media?