Ellett had started snooping. What he knew: \u201cApparently, the site was created by Nexcom, which has similar AI news sites for other cities around the state and country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Interesting. In the sober morning, I cracked open the ol\u2019 MacBook and typed: TheAustin.org. The front page looked sort of legit. Top-left corner said \u201cThe Austin\u201d in gothic script like an old-timey newspaper. From such a legacy paper, you\u2019d expect meaty political articles. Instead, I saw filler stories: petty crime, weather, road closures.<\/p>\n
I clicked a story and found \u2026 basically nothing. A headline, a photo, a byline, but no story. Weird. I clicked another. Same empty space where the text should be.<\/p>\n
This creeped me out. I recalled how in 2024, to pay tribute to reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been imprisoned<\/a> in Russia for a full year, The Wall Street Journal printed a front page with a giant blank space<\/a>. Above it: \u201cHIS STORY SHOULD BE HERE.\u201d<\/p>\n Back on task, I found an article with actual text. Byline: Esther Howard. I clicked. Odd: \u201cEsther,\u201d a woman\u2019s name, with an author photo of a man. The bio called him an editor and NYU grad. I searched LinkedIn, MuckRack, Google \u2013 no footprint.<\/p>\n A TinEye<\/a> reverse-image search showed \u201cEsther\u201d is apparently also \u201cMatthew,\u201d a happy participant in a medical trial<\/a> in a company testing \u201creprogrammed cells.\u201d He\u2019s also an economist named \u201cRichard\u201d who has great things to say about \u0437\u0430\u043f\u0447\u0430\u0441\u0442\u0438\u043d\u0438 \u0434\u043b\u044f \u0432\u0456\u0439\u0441\u044c\u043a\u043e\u0432\u043e\u0457 \u0442\u0435\u0445\u043d\u0456\u043a\u0438. That\u2019s Ukrainian<\/a> and translates to \u201cmilitary spare parts.\u201d The site guarantees their products \u201chave the necessary quality certificates.\u201d<\/p>\n So is Esther a Russian bot peddling faulty news to Texas and faulty weapons to Ukraine?<\/p>\n Never one to shy away from the meta option, I fought fire with fire and enlisted an AI chatbot, Anthropic\u2019s Claude, to search for evidence of an Esther Howard. Claude replied: \u201cEsther Howard is, to my knowledge, one of the stock placeholder person-names that ships with Untitled UI.\u201d<\/p>\n Untitled UI is like a real, virtual version of the fictional Westworld storage room. There, the theme park\u2019s unused robots stand naked in perfect rows. UI offers hundreds of free avatars. Scrolling their faces, I found two of The Austin\u2019s authors.<\/p>\n So okay, maybe the authors aren\u2019t real, but maybe somebody (like, in an actual body) works here. So I googled The Austin\u2019s purported address: 201 W. Fifth St., 11th floor. No hits for \u201cThe Austin\u201d or \u201cNexcom Media\u201d at that building, but \u2026 a shared co-working space? Hmm. I emailed the co-working company and the building\u2019s property managers about The Austin. No response.<\/p>\n I posed a final, burning question to Claude: \u201cHow long would it take you and me to build a site just like TheAustin.org?\u201d<\/p>\n Answer: \u201cA rough working version in an afternoon, a convincing single-site clone in a day or two.\u201d<\/p>\n I Know a Guy<\/p>\n University of Texas journalism professor Talia Stroud, an expert on AI news, met me early-morning over Zoom. Our interview fell down a rabbit hole.<\/p>\n I told her The Austin\u2019s contact email address was for Nexcom Media, which listed dozens of news sites mostly in Texas: Waco, Brownsville, Spring, Odessa, on and on.<\/p>\n Stroud asked: \u201cDid someone create this with an eye toward community and informing the public, or did someone create this with an intention of making money? Or is this sponsored by a political party somehow? I think that is very critical information for the public.\u201d<\/p>\n After I told Stroud the Nexcom sites I\u2019d seen weren\u2019t overtly covering politics, she pointed out politics could emerge later, after sites have established readership and archives. I suggested we check out Nexcom\u2019s network right then. We started scrolling its properties together, from opposite sides of the planet.<\/p>\n Many local Nexcom sites looked just like The Austin. Others were more political. A pro-choice site repackaged material from Ms. Magazine<\/a> and HuffPost Women<\/a>. A conservative evangelical site copied pieces on tracking abortion medicine<\/a> in wastewater and the alleged poisoning of a Christian by a Muslim<\/a>. When attempting to read those articles now, the website provides a pop-up stating \u201cStory not found.\u201d<\/p>\n Lost in the list and hunting for a political thread, I thought out loud: \u201cIt\u2019s incoherent to me.\u201d<\/p>\n In the Zoom window, I saw Stroud squinting in sleuth-mode. \u201cYeah,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m trying to find out if we know anything about who owns this.\u201d<\/p>\n The Founders<\/p>\n When I first reached Nexcom Media<\/a>, its leadership page<\/a> listed three co-founders: Dillon Parkes, Galen Kahlenberg, and Kyle Kahlenberg. Since then, Kyle\u2019s name has vanished.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t find contact information for these people, although a Texas address seems to exist for one. I also searched all three names on sites that track federal<\/a> and Texas<\/a> campaign donations. Nothing.<\/p>\n So, I\u2019d have to interrogate the company itself. I emailed info@nexcom.media on July 20 to request a Zoom. I also listed my questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n I asked about revenue, authorship, the alleged 1988 founding date \u2026 and whether Nexcom followed recent news about the shutdown of Nota News.<\/p>\n Nota News was a similar AI network with 11 sites spanning California to Georgia. It shuttered<\/a> after questioning from Axios and Poynter, which found over 70 examples of content copied without credit.<\/p>\n Nexcom responded on July 21. Every site in its network had been redesigned overnight.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Austin website had a new template. Gone was the gothic script. Gone were the avatar author pages. Stories were now marked with sources, mostly CBS and KVUE. The site called itself \u201cAI-assisted.\u201d<\/p>\n Over email, Nexcom told me it has one (unnamed) Austin employee. On the false authors, it said: \u201cDuring the migration, Nexcom replaced that practice.\u201d Established in 1988? Gone.<\/p>\n Regarding Nota: \u201cIt did not initiate Nexcom\u2019s platform migration, but the issues raised in that reporting overlapped with areas examined during our migration review.\u201d<\/p>\n I followed up. What dates were the migration review? What prompted it?<\/p>\n Nexcom responded: \u201cThe migration and related review took place during July 2026. The initial migration review was completed on July 20. \u2026 It was underway before your inquiry.\u201d<\/p>\n Follow the Money<\/p>\n Full disclosure, I do not know how to do financial forensics yet. Let\u2019s face it, that\u2019s pretty fancy journalism, and one of the things I\u2019m in a master\u2019s program to figure out.\u00a0<\/p>\n I do know how to send a strongly worded email.<\/p>\n Thankfully, Nexcom responded to my money questions. It said it makes no revenue, and \u201cpotential future revenue channels are disclosed at theaustin.org\/ownership<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n That new page explains that Nexcom might eventually profit from fees paid by AI crawlers. I followed up: \u201cIs your audience people or AI chatbots?\u201d They said the intended audience is \u201cprimarily\u201d human.<\/p>\n But look at the code behind<\/a> Nexcom sites, and you\u2019ll see they\u2019re chock-full of metatags for AI. On The Austin, 20 metatags are prefixed \u201cai,\u201d and each is an instruction for machine reading. One uses an MCP server, which serves the sole purpose of connecting AI models to data.<\/p>\n But why? Why feed AI copycat stories when it can already access the originals?<\/p>\n For the Love of the Game<\/p>\n The rumors are true: The United States\u2019 local news ecosystem is in freefall<\/a>. Since 2005, roughly four in 10<\/a> U.S. newspapers have vanished, per the latest Medill School report. Last year, about two or three<\/a> papers closed every week.<\/p>\n This is the kind of thing that keeps a paranoid reporter up at night. And, apparently, UT law professors, too. \u201cI\u2019m worried about our news and journalism system,\u201d Oren Bracha said, as a leading AI copyright expert at UT. \u201cThe AI challenges are real and deep and they go to the core of our democracy. If there is one thing that is clear, it\u2019s that intellectual property rights will not solve them.\u201d<\/p>\n Even before AI comes in, evidence shows losing local news erodes democracy. Researchers find newspaper closures lead to plummeting voter turnout<\/a>, more political division<\/a>, less efficient local government<\/a>, and more corporate misconduct<\/a>.<\/p>\n Maybe AI newsrooms like Nexcom\u2019s could actually help here \u2013 if they were fundamentally different. If they turned City Council agendas into stories, or summarized government reports on local corporations, they could do some watchdog work.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Nexcom sites don\u2019t do that. Rather than filling news gaps, they may simply siphon readers and revenue from the newsrooms they extract from.<\/p>\n Before \u201cthe migration,\u201d Nexcom\u2019s home page<\/a> claimed 68 million views from roughly 5 million readers. Forty of the network\u2019s 59 publicly claimed sites<\/a> cover Texas. And, if AI chatbots are spreading its content to their users, the page view count likely undersells Nexcom\u2019s reach in the state.<\/p>\n But, to what end? It seemed impossible to tell.<\/p>\n So I did what any skeptic of a shady operation might do: I looked at the worst AI news offenders already exposed to the light of day. They come in two forms \u2013 foreign and domestic.<\/p>\n Russia runs a playbook of creating fake local news sites that feed<\/a> Western AI chatbots with Kremlin logic, per investigations from Microsoft<\/a>, Bloomberg<\/a>, NewsGuard<\/a>, and the French government<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Metric Media is a home-brewed poison for our democracy. By 2024, it had created roughly 1,200<\/a> sites to boost right-wing candidates and corporate clients, disguised as local news. A Columbia Journalism Review investigation<\/a> tied Metric<\/a> to Tea Party founders and a Catholic group that spent over $9 million<\/a> against Joe Biden in 2020.<\/p>\n Of course, I found no evidence Nexcom fits either model. The company email said its investors are based in Texas, and they\u2019re the only investors.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s the thing: Nexcom doesn\u2019t have to be part of a big diabolical plot for Texans to have a big problem. This state is already a favorite target for high-tech propaganda.\u00a0<\/p>\n When a Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Russian influence in the 2016 election, it found a troll farm\u2019s most successful<\/a> effort was a Facebook page called Heart of Texas, with 4.8 million shares<\/a>. Russia used it to stage dueling rallies<\/a> outside a Houston mosque in May 2016.\u00a0<\/p>\n And a human reporter like me, Gwen Howerton, has identified at least two other Texas AI networks<\/a> operating like Nexcom as we speak. Hoodline runs false quotes and Dotlife Network runs bizarre photos, like the Astros\u2019 Yordan Alvarez<\/a> \u201chorrifically contorting a bat behind his back.\u201d Howerton calls Nexcom \u201cstill AI slop\u201d but \u201cless egregious.\u201d<\/p>\n Over Zoom, when professor Stroud and I had hit a brick wall on Nexcom\u2019s founders, she said this site could be harmless. The problem isn\u2019t that Nexcom is certainly sinister. It\u2019s that it\u2019s hard to tell what it is.<\/p>\n \u201cIf any of us wanted to do this, with a $20 subscription to Claude, we could do it pretty quickly,\u201d Stroud told me. \u201cIt just opens the floodgates to many, many people with many, many intentions.\u201d<\/p>\n But bad actors in Texas beware: I may be far away, and I may even be slightly tipsy, but I am a real-life human being. And, by God, I am not afraid to use my Texas connections and my Claude subscription against you.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/s1_SecondArt_ZB-Getty-Screenshots_WEB.jpg\")
The Austin alleged author Leslie Alexander; Ava Wright, an available avatar on Untitled UI; The Austin alleged author Esther Howard; a Ukrainian website promoting military spare parts that Richard Swift, an individual sharing Esther Howard\u2019s photo, endorsed Credit: Zeke Barbaro \/ Getty Images \/ screenshots by Maggie Quinlan<\/p>\n