‘Pink slime news’ – named after the hyper-processed meat byproduct – is a kind of pseudo-journalism.
It is widespread in the US and there are signs it is now spreading to a UK news market which is already under attack from AI-generated content distributed by dubious PR outfits.
Christine Lepird, who recently completed her PhD at the Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania, is a leading expert on pink slime. She said: “It looks like a local news website. It uses the same template for all the different local communities that it serves but it does not have local authors to it. It’s pushing different partisan viewpoints, and the ultimate goal is for it to be picked up by social media.”
Last year Newsguard reported that fake pink-slime-style websites outnumbered real local news websites in the US. This pseudo-journalism manifests online and in print, posing as legitimate local outlets while pushing disinformation.
Lepird said: “People trust people in their community, and they turn to those news sources and say, ‘Oh, that’s someone who cares about my neighbourhood.’ So, to go into it and exploit the trust that local reporters have spent years fostering within communities is very dangerous.”
She further explained that there are three primary factors to its spread:
“First of all, it’s very easy to buy a website for local news, and occasionally you’ll even see what we call ‘zombie papers’, where if a local news organisation goes out of business, a pink slime site will purchase that domain name, maintaining that credibility.
“The second element linking to that is the fact that so many local newsrooms have closed since the financial crisis in 2008. So, with all these local news sources closing and how easy it is to just create a website that says, ‘I am, either this website that you already trust or a name that sounds similar enough to it’, it’s very easy to say, ‘oh, well this is probably local news for my community’.
“And then the third is social media because when you see news shared on social media, maybe you’re not going to that pink slime, local news website home page to see like, ‘oh this looks kind of fishy.’”
In the US fake local news websites have been set up to influence public opinion on local solar projects, elections and multimillion-dollar corporate trials.
In July 2025 Press Gazettte reported on news that thousands of fake websites had been set up in France to game Google Discover and it was alleged that 100 such sites had been set up in the UK.
Dubious local news websites have also sprung up in the UK which have some of the calling cards of pink slime outfits, such as lack of detail about ownership, authors or editors and extensive use of stock and possibly AI-generated images.
Headlines at time of writing on London Daily News include “Luxury vacations in Sicily: An itinerary from Cefalù to Taormina” and “Drew Pritchard’s new wife: An insight into the life of the antique dealer and his love story”. Yet delving a little deeper into LDN’s output reveals a slew of articles from questionable sources, such as hundreds of articles promoting online gambling sites including two this year for ‘1xBet’, a Russian-linked online casino which had its license revoked by the UK Gambling Commission in 2019 after a Sunday Times investigation into its operations.
Profile pieces on obscure business figures, especially from the former USSR, are also prevalent. Though nothing seemingly connects the published biographies of a St. Petersburg-based real estate financier, a Ukrainian-Israeli online gambling mogul and a Russian construction industry heavyweight, the purpose of their publication and connection to London seems impossible to determine. Similarly puzzling are the four articles published promoting Uzbek bank Octobank, which has been accused before the European Commission of helping to circumvent Russian sanctions.
So where is LDN getting these articles from, and why are these pieces, unrelated to London and from questionable sources, being published on its platform?
LDN provides the answer itself. The outlet calls itself a “self-publishing news platform”, where anyone, but particularly businesses and PR agencies, can write and produce their own articles, at £25 a piece for press releases, £95 per month for individuals to publish up to seven articles each week, and £195 per month for “agencies” to publish up to 12. LDN claims that it has over 300 subscribed contributors, publishes over 300 articles each week and receives over 260,000 page views monthly.
However, almost none of these “self-published” articles have named bylines.
2Trom Media Group is behind outlets the London Post, London TV, Essex TV, Essex TV Mag, Leicester TV, Manchester TV, Midlands TV, and the Daily Brit, and until approximately 2020 the Hertfordshire Herald, Essex Star, Northern Recorder and Sussex Chronicle.
Much like LDN, the 2Trom outlets are home to large quantities of online gambling advertorials, including for the same Russian-linked group, 1xBet.
In the London Post in particular, this Russian and former Soviet connection deepens.
Articles like: “How the people’s lands came to be owned by Klyachin: The Story of the Biggest Landowner of the Moscow Region” and “Three Billboards Outside Sheremetyevo, Moscow” have cropped up over recent years, and the outlet’s coverage of figures from Russia and Central Asia has become increasingly inflammatory. One article attacks exiled Kazakh politician Mukhtar Ablyazov as a “false flag and distraction actor”, and in a now-removed article from 2023, the London Post alleged that Russian businessman Magomed Musaev sold McDonalds Russia to a sanctioned oligarch, leading Musaev to accuse the London Post of running an “information campaign” against him coordinated from Russia.
An article from 2024 titled “Corruption Networks of Uzbekistan: From Washington to Tashkent” alleges that Uzbek businessman Ovik Mkrtchyan is at the heart of a “calculated web of influence designed to siphon money out of Uzbekistan”. Mkrtchyan has since filed a defamation suit against 2Trom in the English High Court.
2Trom’s main site, and several of its other outlets, state that the group is in three sets of hands: Viktor Tokarev, ‘BE Group’, and ‘Moscow Media Group’ (MMG).
According to Companies House, Tokarev is a Russian national, but he has no other identifiable online presence, and BE Group does not appear anywhere online. Moscow Media Group, however, has a defunct website linked in some of the 2Trom outlet sites.
Visiting the latest version of the Moscow Media Group website from 2019 reveals that MMG is, or was, a Russian PR group. Their specialisms include marketing, “information campaigns”, “reputation management”, “government relations communications” and advertising, among others.
One of the MMG sub-groups, ‘MMG brainstorming’, also claims to have worked on the “implementation of large special projects, (including in co-operation with the Presidential Administration of the Russian Federation, the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, and various ministries and agencies)”.
Sites such as Brit News carry a list of named journalists. But Press Gazette can find no online presence for the individuals other than on 2Trom-owned websites.
LDN and 2Trom Media Group were both approached for comment.
[Read more: PR agency sells AI tool which sends out automated expert comment to journalists]
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog
