An organization representing 2,200 publishers has sent a warning letter to a national website operator to stop scraping content from news outlets in Southern Oregon and in other states. The operator has listed a number of addresses for his operation, including a mailbox service in an Ashland shopping center.
News Media Alliance’s March 25 letter to Good Daily News, which has 356 online newspapers, including Daily Medford, urged the founder, Matt Henderson, to stop taking content from news sources without permission.
“A newsletter like Good Daily doesn’t understand the harm they’re doing,” said Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of News Media Alliance. “We need to call these AI (artificial intelligence) companies out on their bad behavior.”
Good Daily, which operates in 47 states, appears to generate content by scraping up information from news sites, running it through an AI program that then provides a shorter version of the original story. Good Daily sometimes provides links to the source articles.
Based in New York, and incorporated in Delaware, Good Daily publishes online throughout Oregon, including in McMinnville, Salem, Grants Pass and Eugene. The websites are designed to appear to be locally operated, but are developed using artificial intelligence.
One of Good Daily’s websites, Daily Salem, recently listed a post office box address of 1467 Siskiyou Boulevard, Ashland, Oregon 97520-2336 at the bottom of its newsletter. The location is The Mail Stop next to Market of Choice.
However, Daily Medford lists another post office box at 1606 Headway Circle, Suite 9903, Austin, Texas 78754. Daily Medford has a disclaimer indicating the Austin address is not the headquarters for Good Daily.
In the News Media Alliance letter, it states: “Our members have serious concerns about Good Daily’s operations. Good Daily must respect publishers’ data, content, and choice as to whether or not their data/information is used to generate/is (sic) featured in such newsletters. For instance, some publishers’ terms of service expressly prohibit data scraping and crawler bots for use either in general or in connection with artificial intelligence and have invoked robots.txt to block AI scrapers/bots.”
The letter states Good Daily appears to be scraping and indexing publishers’ article contents, web addresses, and other data to generate daily newsletters with “short blurbs.”
Henderson didn’t respond to emails from Ashland.news for this article.
In a NiemanLab article on Jan. 27, written by Andrew Deck, it indicates the Good Daily websites are being operated by one man, Matt Henderson.
The article quotes Henderson as saying that local news providers appreciate the work of Good Daily as a way to promote their content.
“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,” Henderson told NiemanLab.
On the Good Daily websites, “subscribers” share their praises, but the same people, such as “Randy K.” or “Matthew K.” pop up on different sites with the same quotes.
The Good Daily website doesn’t appear to be related to an Ashland Daily Tidings website that also scrapes local content. The Daily Tidings website has bylines by reporters who apparently didn’t actually write the stories.
Coffey said the publishers she represents invest time and money into producing the content they offer to their readers. Some of the publishers she represents use blockers or other methods to foil AI scrapers from accessing the content from AI crawlers, which search for the content. But the blockers affect the bottom line of these companies.
“It’s a drain on our systems when we’re crawled,” she said.
Coffey said News Media Alliance, which has not received a response from Good Daily, is working with the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association.
She said she’s not sure yet how the issue with Good Daily will be resolved but said her organization needs to assert its rights.
“We will be actively pursuing legal recourse wherever we can find it,” Coffey said.
Heidi Wright, president of Fund for Oregon Rural Journalism, an organization founded by EO Media Group in April 2021, said newspapers, both online and print, have stood by too long as content gets scooped up by Google, Facebook and others.
She applauded News Media Alliance’s letter to Good Daily.
“It’s about time,” she said. “We have to start pushing back and protect the content of what small newspapers produce.”
Wright said Ben Campbell, publisher of The Columbian in Vancouver, Washington, recently brought the issue of Good Daily to light when he noticed regional articles being scooped up for Good Daily’s websites.
Wright said there are a number of problems with news aggregators such as Good Daily.
“First of all, I think it creates a lot of confusion in the markets,” she said.
It also takes content created by local newspapers and repackages it without permission, Wright said.
She said Good Daily scoops up advertising dollars that would otherwise go to newspapers, which continue to struggle to exist.
“With over 300 markets (for Good Daily), it’s another play like Google or Facebook,” Hill said.
Daily Medford indicated that the Medford-based Hearts with a Mission, which serves at-risk youth, had won a subscriber contest for yearly donations.
Kevin Lamson, executive director of Hearts with a Mission, confirmed his organization did receive two years of general advertising for the Good Daily donation.
“Unfortunately we did not receive anything as far as cash goes,” he said.
Lamson said the two years of advertising donations would be seen by all Good Daily readers in Oregon.
Good Daily also has a website called Daily Grants Pass, which has short articles about the city.
The Grants Pass Daily Courier recently celebrated its 140th year in operation. The Daily Courier has the distinction of being the oldest independently operated newspaper in Oregon, according to the Oregon Newspaper Publishing Association.
Reach freelance writer Damian Mann at dmannnews@gmail.com. This story first appeared at Ashland.news.
