The rise and fall of an AI-driven ‘local news outlet’ in South Florida

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Photo illustration. [Deirdre Conner and Kate Payne/The Florida Trib]

This story was reported in partnership with Question Everything from KCRW and Placement Theory.

South Florida journalist Sofia Delgado was having a great year.

Reporters at the news outlet she helped launch a few months ago, the South Florida Standard, had been regularly publishing three stories a day, every day of the week – including weekends – with articles ranging from a story detailing the Florida Legislature’s budget breakdown, to federal health care workers quitting rather than taking mandatory assignments at Guantanamo Bay, to revelations that deaths at state mental hospitals were linked to systemic neglect.

Born and raised in Hialeah, the bilingual editor-in-chief and mother of two, and her team even published four stories on Easter Sunday.

It would be an impressive – and gruelling – output for many local news outlets in this era of shrinking newsroom budgets.

If it were real.

Delgado and other “local journalists” identified as staff of the South Florida Standard are creations of artificial intelligence – complete with fake headshots and made-up biographies peppered with South Florida cliches, their bylines plastered on articles that were lifted from actual news outlets, recycled through AI and republished. (Administrators behind the site said they didn’t intend to plagiarize.)

By and large, the people identified as the outlet’s reporters have virtually no other professional history or digital footprint outside of the site, apart from a smattering of social media profiles created in early 2026 that have no posts and no followers.

Notable exceptions include two “reporters” who share the same names as people accused of or convicted of fraud or conspiracy in recent years.

After The Florida Trib started asking questions about the South Florida Standard and its purported journalists, administrators of the site began tinkering with its contents and removing staff bios – before taking the site offline entirely.

Previous versions of the site remain available on the Internet Archive.

A digital mirage masquerading as local news, the South Florida Standard underscores just how easy it has become to corrupt one of the country’s core institutions: independent journalism. At a time when trust in the media has eroded to a historic low, sham news sites like this one are increasingly common in Florida and across the country, a dangerous development for American democracy, experts told The Florida Trib.

The search to find out who was behind the mysterious South Florida Standard, which The Florida Trib undertook in partnership with the media and tech podcast Question Everything, also shows how easy it is for the real people behind these digital doppelgangers to remain in the shadows – evidence of the staggering capabilities of AI and the threat it can pose to an unsuspecting public in a damaged democracy.

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“Clearly, whoever’s behind this does not care about the truth,” said Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at The Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit dedicated to strengthening democracy by improving journalism.

“The only way to address it is to try and find somebody who actually controls the keys to this website,” she added.

‘Take control of the narrative’

To investigate who was behind the South Florida Standard, The Florida Trib and Question Everything turned to experts to look for digital fingerprints in the source code of the site.

Casey Frechette, a journalism professor at the University of South Florida with two decades of web development experience, reviewed the South Florida Standard site and other associated entities at the request of The Florida Trib.

Analyzing the code behind the sites, Frechette identified a trail of digital breadcrumbs that connect the South Florida Standard to a similar “local news” website in South Carolina known as the Charleston Sentinel and a tech-focused site in California called the San Francisco Download. All contained evidence that they were built from the same source code and are controlled by the same entity.

“There are really strong signals that this collection of sites is all part of the same network and specifically managed by the same operator,” Frechette said, adding that he was “99% confident” in the finding.

The three purportedly local news outlets share more...