I hate to unload on the same struggling media outlet twice in one week, in this case the formerly respected Burlington Free Press, but this is outrageous.

Notice anything funky about the byline?

Yeah, “Reporter Assisted by AI.”

It’s one of TWO articles on Tuesday’s front page attributed to Beth McDermott “assisted by AI.”

That’s two out of three stories on the front page, the third being a national story from the USA TODAY content farm.

I hadn’t noticed this before, because I can’t remember the last time I picked up a print copy of that rag. But apparently it’s been going on for a few months at least, and it’s deeply disturbing on two significant levels.

First of all, well, the creeping onset of the AI age, where the journalistic equivalent of SPAM is cranked out by a machine.

Second, and just as bad: These are press releases — euphemistically referred to by the AI-assisted McDermott as “community announcements” — that have been turned into something that presents itself as “news.” This wasn’t a local journalist talking to the Rokeby to find out how the money will be spent or reaching out to the Patrick Foundation to find out why the Rokeby was a worthwhile investment; this is a reporter in some far-flung corner of the Gannett empire feeding a press release into a machine, fine-tuning the result, and presenting it as though it were actual news. ON THE FRONT PAGE!

There is a grand total of one quote in the story (which runs to a meager seven paragraphs), and it was clearly lifted from Rokeby’s press release.

And the Freeps’ front page presents not one, but TWO of these artificial creations as if they were actual news.

When I looked into this, I immediately came across a March 2025 article on WGBH.com, co-written by Sarah Betancourt and Lisa Wardle with no machine assistance, revealing that “several Boston-area news publications” are publishing stories from the tag team of Beth McDermott and “Espresso,” Gannett’s bespoke AI content generator.

Boston.com, the Boston Globe’s unpaywalled little sister, ran its own story about the development that included a canned statement from an unidentified “USA TODAY spokesman”:

“By leveraging AI, we are able to expand coverage and enable our journalists to focus on more in-depth reporting. With human oversight at every step, AI-assisted reporting meets our high standards for quality and accuracy to provide our readers more valuable content which they’ve always associated with the USA TODAY Network.”

Okay. well, a lot to unpack there. First of all, the thing about enabling reporters to focus on “in-depth reporting” is what media organizations always say when they do something like this, and they never mean it. This development is more likely to allow The Burlington Free Press to cut the size of its newsroom even further than to expand its journalistic efforts.

Second, I can hardly tell you what I think of Gannett’s “standards for quality and accuracy” without resorting to a string of expletives. What “standards” allow a reputable news outlet to disguise press releases as actual news?

Not to mention that the second sentence in that quote reads like it was generated by Espresso without any fine-tuning from a human.

I feel sorry for McDermott. I’m picturing her chained to a desk in a windowless room, spending day after day feeding stacks of press releases into Espresso’s gaping maw, tweaking the output to make it plausibly human, and sending the results to Gannett outlets far and wide.

A few days ago, I said that The Burlington Free Press needed to die. I believe it even more strongly after reading about Gannett’s use of AI to lightly launder PR bumpf and fill its news hole with this garbage.