Southern Indiana does not have a shortage of “news.” It has a shortage of people willing 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 sells compiles and then sells them for a fee.
The circular on the Boardwalk
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 the paper you did not need.
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 Watchdog get your records. Manual background search, fifteen dollars, a “verified snapshot of an individual’s public legal footprint.” Statute translator. Sentencing estimator.
That is not watchdogging. That is a copy shop with a badge in the logo. The absurdity is not that public records exist. The absurdity is selling the courthouse back to the county that already paid for it, one fifteen-dollar name at a time.
Linton has the other flavor of the same kitchen. 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. It does not change the diet. The traffic 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 someone else’s booking photo before breakfast.
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, then went back to the school board and the mill and the road that washed out. The log was a civic utility. It was not the business model.
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. We use it. We do not hide it. 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, buildings, and staff meetings.
That is not a humblebrag. It is a statement of a very simple fact. The complaint we get is that a machine helped write the sentence. 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 about the place you live, 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 order to put your bookings, obits and inspection reports in. 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 hand you the log. 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 photo. Things are to the point that the only people interested enough to film a meeting are hoping they get enough FN cash to buy a cheeseburger from it. Then everybody wonders why the town feels meaner and no better informed.
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. Teachers who just retired. Dispatchers, crotchety old people (me included).
You do not need a newsroom on the square just willingness to to develop real content for the county you actually live in not a remix of the public file, not a Facebook page that plays dress-up there is room foe 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.