Inside a network of AI-generated newsletters targeting “small town America”

On first glance, Good Day Fort Collins appears to be a standard local news round-up. One recent edition of the newsletter includes short blurbs and links to over a dozen stories about the mid-size Colorado city — a restaurant opening, a record-breaking snowfall, a leadership shake-up at a local hospital.

The newsletter attributes the stories to longtime Fort Collins news outlets, like The Coloradoan and the Loveland Reporter-Herald. Further down is a spread of events happening across the city, including an upcoming polar plunge and a figure-drawing class.

“I’m a senior citizen here in Fort Collins, and this newsletter is like a lifeline. I don’t have the attention span these days to read the paper, and Facebook is a mess,” reads one testimonial on the sign-up page from “Matthew K., retiree.” “I use Good Day Fort Collins to keep one foot in the town I grew up in, and my friends and family continue to live in,” says “Michael H., expat.”

Google those quotes, though, and you’ll find the same names and testimonials supporting hundreds of other local newsletters across the U.S. “Matthew K.” also lives in Queen Creek, Arkansas; and Post Falls, Idaho; and Marysville, Washington; and Denton, Texas. “Michael H.” grew up in each of these towns, and many more.

It turns out Good Day Fort Collins is just one in a network of AI-generated newsletters operating in 355 cities and towns across the U.S. Not only do these hundreds of newsletters share the same exact seven testimonials, they also share the same branding, the same copy on their about pages, and the same stated mission: “to make local news more accessible and highlight extraordinary people in our community.”

You wouldn’t know any of that as a subscriber. Separate website domains and distinct newsletter names make it difficult to connect the dots. There is Good Day Rock Springs, Daily Bentonville, Today in Virginia Beach, and Pittsburgh Morning News, to name just a few. Nothing in the newsletter copy discloses that they are part of a national network or that the article curation and summary blurbs are generated using large language models (LLMs).

The newsletters do all name the same founder and editor: Matthew Henderson.

Beyond an editor contact email, there is no information in the newsletters about Henderson, his operating location, or the company behind the newsletters. The email used for website domain registrations is tied to a blank website. Only after making a $5 reader donation to Good Day Fort Collins was I able to trace the charge, and the website ownership, to Good Daily Inc. The company doesn’t have an online presence but is incorporated in both Delaware and New York.

Considering how little Henderson shares about himself or his company in his newsletters, I was surprised that he was a real person, and that he responded to my email.

Henderson is a serial internet startup founder and software engineer whose past companies include the on-demand blog-writing service Scribble and the journalist email database Press Hunt. Good Daily is currently a one-man operation, Henderson says. Though AI use is not disclosed to Good Daily subscribers, in an interview Henderson didn’t shy away from the fact that each newsletter is produced using near full automation.

“Our goal is to use automation and technology everywhere we possibly can without sacrificing product quality for our readers,” he told me in an email, explaining that he built the back-end technology that outputs the hundreds of newsletter editions every day.

These automated agents “read the news” in every town where Good Daily operates, curate the most relevant stories, summarize them, edit and approve the copy, format it into a newsletter, and publish. Henderson declined to share any more specifics about his use of LLMs, calling it proprietary. “At a high level, [the system] operates much like an editorial team,” he said.

Currently, Good Daily is operating in 47 states with a focus on “small town America.” One of the smallest towns is Rock Springs, Wyoming, which has a population of just over 20,000.

“Local news should be local. The problem is, at this point, there are economic challenges keeping that from happening. Smaller communities rarely can support enough staff to run a traditional news organization,” said Henderson, who currently runs Good Daily from New York City. “I see technology, and LLMs specifically, as our best shot to fix this.”

In fact, Henderson sees his automated newsletter as boosting the work of struggling local news outlets. “The summary is designed to prompt the reader to go read the human’s content…it’s just AI’s job to promote that,” he said. “Local news providers appreciate our work promoting their best local content for free, and often seek out ways for us to promote even more of their content.”

Henderson’s rosy view of his impact on local news publishing was not shared by several outlets I spoke to that are regularly aggregated by Good Daily.

“His claim is, frankly, horseshit. The suggestion that he’s helping news deserts is absurd,” said Rodney Gibbs, the head of audience and product at the National Trust for Local News (NTLN). The nonprofit owns 65 local newspapers across Georgia, Maine, and Colorado, several of which are regularly aggregated by Good Daily newsletters.

Gibbs points out that, in order to operate, AI newsletters rely on human labor at existing local news publishers. Generally, I found, Good Daily links to the handful of operating newsrooms in any given town, including legacy daily newspapers, radio stations, and independent digital outlets. Websites for local news broadcasters were the most common source. In each case, Good Daily could compete with these outlets for local advertising.

“Consider the Georgia markets he’s targeting — most already have multiple, established news sources that he is recycling as fodder for his newsletters,” said Gibbs. Henderson’s Daily Macon, for example, regularly aggregates half a dozen different publications, including The Middle Georgia Times, the website for NBC affiliate WMGT, and The Macon Melody, NTLN’s own digital outlet, which it launched last summer.

Over the past 90 days, referrals from Daily Macon totaled four engaged sessions, according to Gibbs. “That puts it at the very bottom of our referral sources. It’s clear that Daily Macon is not a meaningful traffic driver,” he said. (In its advertiser media kit, Daily Macon says it has 13,300 subscribers in Georgia and a 26% click-to-open rate.)

Gibbs takes issue with more than Good Daily’s referral numbers. “From fabricated testimonials on his websites to the absence of contact information and zero transparency about his information-gathering process including AI usage, his approach completely undermines the principles of trustworthy journalism,” he said.

Journalists in other states have also taken note of Good Daily, at times when a local edition started appearing in their own inboxes. “I was signed up for Daily Bentonville without my consent. I immediately unsubscribed after doing a Google search and seeing that the same ‘testimonials’ — allegedly from local readers in my community appeared on dozens of other city newsletter pages,” said Sam Hoisington, the founder and editor of The Bentonville Bulletin, an independent digital news outlet in Northwest Arkansas. “I don’t necessarily have a problem with aggregation or AI usage, but I do have a problem with dishonesty.”

Henderson denied his newsletter testimonials are fabricated, instead calling the names “anonymized” and the quotes “sanitized amalgamations of some of our favorite (and most common) testimonials.”

Promises and profits

Good Daily makes money from its newsletters in a few ways. For one, readers can contribute to the newsletters directly. A reader donation page offers $5/month and $50/year tiers, with a promised birthday shout out for contributors (though it’s worth noting, Nieman Lab’s faux birthday wasn’t shouted out after a test $5 contribution).

“Producing this free daily newsletter for the Fort Collins community is not an easy job,” reads the call to action. “We are dedicated to keeping Good Day Fort Collins free forever — like local news should be. But that is not without challenge!”

Henderson has successfully courted both national and local advertisers. I found hundreds of Good Daily newsletters that were sponsored by Morning Brew, the Axel Springer–owned newsletter company headquartered in New York.

A spokesperson for Morning Brew confirmed that a third-party vendor had recently run a digital ad campaign that included Good Daily. “After reviewing these newsletters we’ve ended the program with our third-party vendor that included Good Daily,” the spokesperson said, “as this is not the type of newsletter production that we would like to be associated with.”

Other national advertisers, including the wellness company Hims and the Android smartphone company Mode Mobile, similarly told me their sponsorships had been placed by a contracted ad buyer. Local advertisers I spoke to were more likely to have reached out directly to place their ads.

Cameron Kawato, a managing partner at Anzel Legal in Fort Collins, said his firm began advertising with Good Day Fort Collins in December 2024. “I learned about it because I was subscribed and receiving the publications. I don’t know how I got subscribed, and what is weird is [it sent to] an email I don’t really use,” Kawato told me. Still, the local Fort Collins audience seemed like a fit and the firm paid around $150 for the first six months of ad placements. According to analytics on an advertiser portal, one of their ads had 12,850 views, the other just over 26,000 views.

Several readers I spoke to echoed Kawato, saying they had no memory of signing up for their Good Daily newsletter but that at some point last year it started appearing in their inboxes.

Henderson denies ever buying or using local email address lists, instead claiming the most likely explanation is that the readers’ friends, family members, or colleagues signed them up. “We obviously encourage our most engaged readers to share and invite others to the newsletter. Some take their own liberties in how they do that,” he said. “We have comprehensive list pruning processes to ensure that only opted-in, engaged readers receive emails from us.”

Henderson claims Good Daily has primarily grown its newsletter subscription base organically. The business began early last year, after he launched a “<5-minute TLDR” to keep him and his grandparents in the loop with the latest news from their hometown of Great Falls, Montana.

“I wanted news from multiple sources, and nothing that isn’t relevant to the town. Local papers publish mostly regional and national news nowadays, which I prefer to get elsewhere,” he said. Henderson says referrals were his biggest traffic driver, and the proof of concept pushed him to launch newsletters in surrounding towns in Montana, including Helena and Billings. Over the past year, he expanded to the West Coast, then the South, and most recently to the East Coast. Aside from the story summaries and news sources, the newsletters in each town are mirror copies of one another.

Henderson says the company now has hundreds of thousands of subscribers across its newsletters. One screenshot of the company’s analytics dashboard Henderson shared with me puts the number at 407,752.

These figures, however, contradict audience numbers listed on advertiser pages. Each contact form says “our content reaches hundreds of thousands” of people from that respective state, every month. That includes the contact form for Good Day Rock Springs, which claims to reach “hundreds of thousands of Wyomingites.” The current population of Wyoming is just over 580,000, which would mean Good Daily’s content currently reaches over a third of the state’s residents.

Henderson says the statement doesn’t specify that reach is strictly through “organic newsletter impressions,” and that he is experimenting with promoting advertisers outside the newsletter as well. “[I] supplement that with other sources: paid media, placements in other local media sites, organic search traffic, organic social.” He said he plans to change the contact form copy next month.

The peculiarities with Good Daily don’t stop there. Henderson has launched a “give back” program in roughly half of the markets he’s operating in, more than 150 towns and cities. Readers can vote each day for one local nonprofit on the newsletter websites. At the end of the year, each newsletter promises to “donate 10% of our advertising profits” to the organization with the most votes.

The Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Washington won the 2024 reader competition for Daily Spokane. “News to us,” said Marit Fisher, the museum’s chief marketing officer. “None of us here have ever heard of this newsletter.”

Neither had anyone at Loaves & Fishes Community Services in Illinois, the winner of the 2024 reader competition for Daily Naperville, which said it had not entered itself into the competition.

Other local nonprofits I spoke to, however, had actually led voting campaigns. “Once we knew about the voting competition last year we encouraged people to subscribe to the newsletter and vote for us,” said Cheryl Campbell, the executive director of Children’s Speech & Reading Center, the winner of the 2024 competition for Good Day Fort Collins.

A notification on the Good Day Fort Collins voting portal announced the Center as the winner and asked them to reach out to collect their prize. Despite their subscription campaign, the Center hadn’t seen the notification and hadn’t heard directly from Good Day Fort Collins. Campbell only reached out after I notified her. “I did hear back from the editor, but they said that they didn’t know what the ‘prize’ would be, that they’d had a rough year financially.”

Henderson emphasized that winning nonprofits are entitled to 10% of advertising profits, not revenue. “Our books are not yet finalized, so we do not know how much our contributions will be in each market,” he said, clarifying that profit in any one market this year would likely be “very small.” “For markets where we end up not earning a profit, we’ll be working directly with the winners to design creative packages (generous amounts of advertising credits, etc.) to support them this year,” he said.

“The only local news I get”

Good Daily is not the first to experiment with AI-generated news for local, or even hyperlocal, audiences. Last fall, I reported on OkayNWA, a site in Northwest Arkansas that scrapes social media posts to output its own AI-generated local events coverage. Hoodline has been publishing AI-generated content through its 40-city local news network, including stories bylined by fake reporters.

Local news even appears to be in the sightline of major AI companies, like OpenAI. Earlier this month, Axios announced a new partnership with OpenAI, which will fund the launch of four new city-specific newsletters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Kansas City, Missouri; Boulder, Colorado; and Huntsville, Alabama. Far from fully automated, Axios plans to hire journalists in each city to manage these newsletters, who will have access to OpenAI tools.

Good Daily currently produces no original reporting, but Henderson does not rule out that possibility and considers his use of automation a model for the future of rural news. “If we can solve the hardest challenges — technology, growth, monetization — small teams (even one-person teams) could run profitable local news operations in every town across the country,” he said.

For the moment, the 350-plus local news teams are still operated by the same person. Most readers are still in the dark about who that person is. A thread on the Fort Collins, Colorado subreddit includes over a dozen residents asking about the newsletter and speculating about how it got ahold of their email addresses. Some were more than happy to receive it.

“It’s the only instance I can think of where spam seems to actually provide value,” reads one comment.

“I haven’t unsubscribed yet because it’s the only local news I get,” reads another.