Southern Indiana does not have a shortage of “news.” It has a shortage of people willing to do anything past copy and pasting arrest records and obituaries.
Southern Indiana has a hundreds of websites and Facebook pages pantomiming some version journalism. Linton News. Lawrence County Watchdog, which also answers to Lawrence County Independent 'News', Greene Streets. “Mugshots and Records” typically the bold selling point. The pages post a booking photo, a charge, a town, and allows for comments. They are not secret. They are not even subtle. One of them compiles and then sells them for a fee.
The circular on the Sidewalk
Years ago I lived in Daytona. After dark, bums would line up outside of the bars and hand out misprint shopping circulars that my company threw away earlier in the day. Yesterday’s grocery ads. Wrong prices. Pages that never made it into a real paper. They wanted change for stuff someone has already seen, or items not fit for print.
Our own local version.
A sheriff’s log is a public document. So is a marriage license list. So is a docket. Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act says you can have them. The official jail roster and MyCase will give most of it to you for nothing. Wrapping that sheet in a siren emoji, a stock mug, and a “FULL STORY” paywall does not make it a newspaper. It makes it a circular with better hosting.
One of our worst offenders runs police logs and court blurbs. The Facebook page is titled like a booking desk: Mugshots and Records. They also offer "Public Records Concierge. "Don’t let the government ignore you — let the us get your records. Manual background search, fifteen dollars", a “verified snapshot of an individual’s public legal footprint.” Statute translator. Sentencing estimator.
This is less watchdogging and more a copy shop with a badge in the logo. It's absurd that re-selling a county's record back to the public is a 'thing', one fifteen-dollar name at a time.
Linton has a much similar operation. Crime tags. Paid-only booking writeups. A headline formula that could be generated by a rubber stamp: Resident Facing [Charge] Highlights Recent [County] Arrest Log. Some meeting briefs and obituaries sneak through, which is more than some pages bother with. The product is in the worst day of somebody’s cousin’s life, formatted for people to share and snicker over.
Facebook allows the same service for free. Pages that call themselves news organizations and post nothing but a name, a charge, and a comment thread. Groups that treat the jail list like a yearbook. No beat. No follow-up on whether the charge stuck. No curiosity about the council vote that will cost more than the meth case they just screenshot. Just volume, and the warm feeling of having seen a familiar face in the booking photo.
Public record is not a personality
There is a legitimate use for a police log. A real paper used to run it in six-point type on an inside page so the town knew who got picked up, hitched or died. The log was a civic utility.
These sites inverted that. The utility became the product. The product became a feed. The feed became a storefront for more of the same data, scraped, sorted, and resold. Follow a story for three days and you will watch the same arrest migrate from the sheriff’s site to a Facebook mug page to a “news” URL with a new title and the same facts, sometimes after another outlet already did the work of noticing the meeting, the contract, or the grant.
How are we any different?
The Mr.Newz network hears about it's use of AI constantly. Yes, we use AI openly and it works great if used correctly. Case in point: Two part-time administrators and two retirees have been enough to put volume on eight counties — Monroe, Lawrence, Greene, Martin, Jackson, Washington, Brown, Orange — and to rank in search against publications that have had decades doing the same thing.
We aren't bragging. It is a statement of a very simple fact. The complaint we get is that if AI is involved, how does the ready differentiate. Fair enough. Read the sentence next to a Watchdog booking dump or a Linton “highlights recent arrest log” piece and decide which one was built to tell you something new, and which one was built to keep you scrolling while breaking down any hope you live in a nice town?
The generative parts here are tools. The judgment is not. We pick subjects that are not already a PDF on the sheriff’s site. We stay with a Flock contract, a farm assessment table, a hospital that closed obstetrics, a chain restaurant that locked the door at 8 p.m. We will be wrong sometimes. We will be late sometimes. We will not sell you your neighbor’s public legal footprint for fifteen dollars and call it independence.
Poorly thought-out art and derivative copy are not “old school.” They are what you get when the only real journalistic choice to be had is what emoji to pepper into your bookings, obits. Authentic, even with AI, still requires a person who lives here to say: that is the story, and that is not.
Notice
If your entire publication can be rebuilt from the jail roster, the marriage-license list, and last week’s docket, you are not competing with a newspaper. You are competing with the clerk. The clerk already works for the county. You are the man on the sidewalk with the misprint circular, asking for change.
The courthouse will still furnish logs. Nobody is taking that away. What is being taken, quietly, is the habit of expecting more than the log. Readers start to think local news is the booking photos and the yawn inducing minutia of filings. Things are to the point that the only people interested enough to film a meeting are hoping they get enough FB cash to buy a cheeseburger from it. And people wonder why there is such a pervasive apathy towards civic apathy and small town development.
If you can write, write here
This is the part that is easier said than done.
Southern Indiana is full of people who know the difference between a story that interests them and one that wastes their time. Business Owners, Church Members, Dispatchers, crotchety old people (me included). Anyone in any capacity has the ability to share information about their community in a way that provokes and informs.
You do not need a newsroom on the square, just willingness to develop real content for the county you actually live in and not a remix of the public file, not a Facebook page that plays dress-up there is room for this and the notes we get to the site prove it.
The circulars will keep coming. They always do. The question is whether anybody in these eight counties still wants a paper that is not one.
No thoughts yet — be the first.