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Steven Bassin used to work as a sports reporter for centraljersey.com, but he has not been with the company in almost four years. So why are his bylines popping up as recently as this week?
“I haven’t worked there, like I said, for three years,” Bassin said. “It’s going to be four years this January. I now see a story done (recently) on Lionel Messi with my name on it, and clear as day, I don’t work there anymore. I, clear as day, didn’t write this story, so I don’t know why I’m being used there.”
And Bassin noticed another interesting thing – he and his former coworker, Mark Rosman, had photos listed on their profiles that weren’t them.
“It’s kind of ridiculous that they have Mark and me as totally different people and that we’re still on their page as well,” Bassin said.
For months, Billy Penn has been keeping tabs on several local news websites – including Northeast Times, Lower Bucks Times, the South Philly Review and centraljersey.com. What we found led us down a local news rabbit hole that had us questioning reality.
At least four journalists on the centraljersey.com site had stories under their author pages that they did not write and photos that were not of them — one of whom was WHYY’s own Ken Downey Jr.
“That’s not me,” Downey said when he saw his author page.
The picture of Downey on centraljersey.com looked around the same age as the real Downey and he was wearing similar glasses. But, it wasn’t him.
“That is my name associated with my former publication,” he explained. “That is a bio that looks pretty accurate about myself, but that is not my picture. These two top articles; those are not my work. They are dated as recent as of this year. I haven’t been associated with the company in almost a full seven years.”
Multiple regional print publications have operated under the centraljersey.com umbrella, including The Princeton Packet, one of the country’s oldest weekly newspapers that was founded in 1786.
Andrew Martins has not written for any of these Central Jersey papers since 2018. Yet his most recent byline on the website at the time of publication is a story published on July 30.
“As someone who’s currently in the job market and in this line of work, my byline is incredibly important, and to see my byline not just be used in a new way, but also to not have my actual photo there, it’s just extremely disconcerting,” he said.
What’s more, it was hard to find his past articles on the site.
“I’m a four-time New Jersey Press Association Award winner, and none of those award-winning articles are up on the page,” he said. “Most of my work is gone, and if it’s supposed to be a record of what happened in these communities, it’s doing an extreme disservice to those communities.”
It was unclear which people listed on Central Jersey’s author page were current reporters and which were not.
“Mark Rosman is an older, smaller Jewish man who is white, and this picture is a younger Black man,” Downey said. “So I know for a fact that is not Mark.”
So if Martins, Bassin and Downey aren’t writing these stories, who is?
What the heck is going on?
It all began in July, when WHYY’s Meir Rinde noticed something peculiar. The northeasttimes.com, another local news website, had written an article strangely similar to his.
The story was part of Billy Penn’s city guide series — focusing on Bustleton and Somerton. The same day, Northeast Times posted their version and the language in the opening paragraphs was oddly similar:
Billy Penn: The neighborhoods of Bustleton and Somerton in Northeast Philadelphia, along the city’s border with Montgomery and Bucks counties, have been called “Little Odessa” for their large numbers of residents who are immigrants from Russia, Ukraine, and other parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Northeast Times: The neighborhoods of Bustleton and Somerton, tucked along Philadelphia’s border with Montgomery and Bucks counties, are home to at least 43,000 immigrants born in Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The concentration is dense enough that the area has earned the nickname “Little Odessa.”
Not only that, but Northeast Times website reporter Ellen Kowalczyk used the same exact quotes as the ones published in Billy Penn, and nowhere in the article does she attribute Rinde, Billy Penn or WHYY for them.
So who is Kowalczyk? Well, this is where things get even weirder.
Kowalczyk’s bio, says that she was “a longtime resident” of the Far Northeast, who has “followed the area’s growth for years” and “she knows which developments and which meetings actually matter.”
While this sounds nice, that background is vague. Nowhere on the website does it say where Kowalczyk went to school or where she worked prior to writing at the paper. It’s also hard to find her online. She doesn’t appear to have LinkedIn or social media accounts. And when you zoom in on her picture, it’s interesting…
Kowalczyk gives a gentle smile to the camera on an unknown Philly street. Nearly identical brick rowhomes line the entire block, all with nearly identical gray cars parked out front. The fence lines outside of the homes look like they’re bleeding into each other. A large tree, which may be sprouting from the street itself, appears behind Kowalczyk’s head.
We began to wonder if this photo, along with Kowalczyk’s bio details, could be AI-generated. We ran the photo through Hive Detect, a tool to detect things created by artificial intelligence, albeit an imperfect one, that found the photo was 99.9% likely to be AI-generated. Then, we started looking into the entire newsroom.
There was Maya Brooks, a culture and trends reporter. Her pet peeves included “headlines that say something ‘broke the internet’ when nothing actually broke.” Or Ray Doyle, a public safety and courts reporter, whose bio says he is a “lifelong Flyers fan” and “grew up a few blocks from the 15th District.” Community reporter Pat Nowak “taught fourth grade in the Northeast for nearly thirty years” and “sings in her parish choir.” Apparently, “half the neighborhood still calls her ‘Miss Nowak.’”
However, upon a closer look, these reporters’ pages had the same red flags as Kowalczyk’s. Their bios were vague. They did not appear to have any internet presence beyond their journalism work, and we couldn’t rule out that their photos were AI-generated.
And when we reached out to the company behind the site for comment, all of this disappeared within 24 hours.
An AI-generated newsroom
As of Nov. 9, the Northeast Times website insisted that they did not use AI in their reporting. The news website addressed their AI policy, saying that a “human answers for every piece” and that they used “no fake photos.”
Wanting to investigate these claims, we looked into at least 10 stories on the site that had the same sources and quotes from not only Billy Penn, but also WHYY, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Mag, The Philly Citizen, 6abc and other local outlets.
There’s an article about a free arts program from July that closely mimics reporting from the Philadelphia Citizen. Unattributed quotes are taken from an Inquirer article about a Northeast deli closure, and the sandwich photo in the Northeast Times version feels laughably off.
Even an article about tools to prevent unwanted AI was seemingly reworded and published on the site. Sometimes the language, not just the quotes, could be identical:
WHYY: Rather than treating AI as an abstract concept, the workshops focus on practical skills, from explaining technical terminology to showing participants how AI tools actually work and what they can and cannot do.
Northeast Times: Rather than treating AI as an abstract concept, the workshops focus on practical skills, from explaining technical terminology to showing participants how AI tools actually work and what they can and cannot do.
Many main images on stories appeared as though they could be AI-generated. Images of the Philadelphia skyline or City Hall were unattributed and looked manipulated. We found photos taken by Billy Penn reporters on Northeast Times stories that we did not authorize them to use — like this one from Billy Penn’s Nick Kariuki. And those were just the stories we looked into.
Even more alarming, we learned that they weren’t the only local news website that had this structure. Other local news websites – all of which appeared to be connected to papers owned by Donnelly Media – raised the same questions.
On Lower Bucks Times’ website, one author named Tyler Dunphey had a coffee shop behind him in a photo. Except that coffee shop does not appear to exist online. The logo in the photo is different on the window and sign. The South Philly Review also looked as if it could be using AI-generated images in its stories. Star News Philly was writing about how to deal with Philly’s massive snowstorm this week, despite there clearly not being one in any forecast. New reporters seemed to be generating over 10 stories in one day.
Who runs these websites?
The Northeast Times is a nearly century-old paper in Philadelphia, established in 1932. So what is going on? To understand, we’re going to need to go back a decade.
In 2016, the Northeast Times papers were bought by Richard Donnelly, of Donnelly Distribution, a New Jersey-based distribution company.
That same year, Donnelly bought a majority interest in Packet Media LLC, the parent company of centraljersey.com, which includes The Princeton Packet, and rebranded Donnelly Distribution to Newspaper Media Group. The company also goes by the name Donnelly Media.
The company currently owns over 20 publications in the Philly and New Jersey area, including the Lower Bucks Times and the South Philly Review in Philadelphia, and several Central and South Jersey newspapers. The group’s CEO is now Sean Donnelly, Richard Donnelly’s son, who took over as the company’s chief executive following his father’s death in 2018.
Bassin has attempted to reach out to former colleagues at Newspaper Media Group to fix his current byline.
“I’ve tried to reach out to people that I worked with beforehand that I had contact information with, but I haven’t heard back from anybody,” he said.
Donnelly Media did have legitimate journalism on some of the sites connected to the company, as well as for their print editions. They also own Lifestyles Magazines Events, which is a real magazine and event branch of the company, with actual reporters. However, Bassin’s problem is ongoing.
Since we spoke with him, more articles have continued to creep up under his byline. There are over 30 published articles from Nov. 3 to Nov. 9 that Bassin said he did not write. Bassin noted much of the content was on “betting sites,” which is far from his area of coverage.
“When you click on centraljersey.com all my stories are front and center that I’ve not written,” he said. “It’s bad. I’m very frustrated, very upset. I’m very worried that something could affect me from this.”
At this point, we believed we had found our culprit on who was behind all this confusion. However, when we reached out to Donnelly Media, the thread kept unraveling.
It’s not Donnelly Media
While Donnelly Media does indeed own all of these papers, apparently they do not actually own the website domains linked to them.
Brandon Chamberlain, general manager at Donnelly Media, said that Paradise Media was the company we should be looking into.
“We sold some of our domains to them (around) 2023 and 2024,” Chamberlain said, “and we sold not only the domains but the existing content as well.”
According to Chamberlain, Donnelly Media was going through a bit of a rebrand and thought the sale would help digital revenue, which was struggling at the time. When Paradise Media reached out about the deal, they took interest, he said.
“It was understood that the writers still currently employed by us, their content would live on there, not be changed,” he said. “It would be sort of an archive site. We wouldn’t have any ownership of it, but their content would stay up there, which is perfectly fine. And then we would begin posting our content under a newly branded site.”
Websites like patimes.media and centraljersey.media are the actual online sites affiliated with local print editions like the Northeast Times, Lower Bucks Times and New Jersey papers, he explained.
Paradise Media is based in Puerto Rico and Malta. According to their website, they are a company that brings “fresh thinking to digital marketing.” The company does not list which domains they own or how many. Paradise Media is also the company responsible for turning Philadelphia Weekly into a “zombie site,” per Axios.
As of Nov. 9, some of the Paradise Media-owned sites still listed Donnelly Media as their owner — and referred readers to their actual print versions.
Although Donnelly Media now has its own sites that post Northeast Times and Central Jersey content, the Paradise Media-owned sites contain the same branding.
What’s more, as of Nov. 9, there still weren’t any disclosures on sites owned by either Donnelly Media or Paradise Media that explained the difference in their affiliation.
Was Donnelly Media concerned that selling their domains would cause confusion among readers?
“Hindsight being the way it is, we’re not sure we would go down the same route,” Chamberlain said. “Because it just does confuse the readers.”
Some reporters have contacted Chamberlain, concerned that their bylines are being used without permission. Even current Donnelly Media reporters have stories listed under the site that Chamberlain said they had not written, including PA Times Media’s editor, Tom Waring.
“We’ve been able to deal with everything on a case-by-case basis,” Chamberlain said. “So when a call comes in, we deal with it swiftly. We explain what exactly the issue is, and we reach out to the contact at Paradise, and … generally, they take the story down.”
None of the Paradise Media sites should have the Donnelly Media name associated with them, he said. He suspects that AI is involved with the issue, citing incorrect information in stories and suspicious photos.
“I don’t know where their employees are, or even if there are employees,” he said.
Still, Chamberlain was not worried that this would be an ongoing problem.
“The problems are fewer and fewer and fewer,” he said. “We haven’t lost any sales.”
“None of our writers want to take credit for anything that is not theirs,” Chamberlain added. “Especially since many things posted on those sites are inaccurate.”
However, he did note that the companies could do a better job to distinguish themselves from one another.
“Speaking to you,” Chamberlain added. “We may push a little harder for the separation.”
Although Donnelly Media no longer owns some of these website domains, Bassin is upset with his former publication.
“I’ll be honest with you, it makes me feel taken advantage of even more,” he said. “This should have been taken care of a long time ago.”
“The fact of the matter is, (Donnelly Media) sold the site,” he said. “People are still getting affected by it that used to work for them or still work for them. So I don’t know why they haven’t done a good enough job to shut this down if they know about it.”
AI news? ‘It’s everywhere’
There are ethical uses for AI in newsrooms, said Alex Mahadevan, a faculty member specializing in AI and AI policy at the Poynter Institute (ironically – this is also the institute the Northeast Times cites in its AI policy).
“Ethical AI use is thinking about a newspaper’s values, or thinking about journalism’s values, like transparency, accountability and doing no harm, and using AI within those frameworks that align with values that we hold dear as journalists,” he said.
AI-generated text is where the water gets murky, he said.
“That’s sort of where we’ve drawn the line is AI writing, and so I think that’s sort of the next big ethical question that is out there,” Mahadevan said.
Mahadevan has been following AI usage cropping up in local papers such as The Cleveland Plain Dealer, as well as sites like McClatchy, Prism News and Nota News. He said that this problem is actually more common than you might think.
“It’s everywhere,” he said. “It is literally in every community in the entire country; there are AI-generated newspapers that are popping up.”
Some companies may argue that AI tools are a great way to summarize press releases or police reports for understaffed areas or news deserts. The problem, Mahadevan noted, is that many of these outlets are cropping up in areas that may already have plenty of news resources.
He said there are “tells” to be able to see if text is AI-generated.
“(AI models) are good at modeling language, but they’re not good at writing,” he said. “They model language. It’s what a paragraph looks like, but it’s not how a paragraph is actually written.”
What’s more, AI tools are hard to control — which can trail into plagiarism territory.
“You cannot just automate a news site,” Mahadevan said. “You can’t do it. You cannot do it. And so when people try to do it, it just ends up plagiarizing a real news site to try to look like a news site.”
Are these sites profitable? Mahadevan said he does not see how they could be.
“These are not good news sites. They’re terrible. So I can’t, for the life of me, figure out how they’re trying to make money off of a defective product, but that’s what they’re putting out there,” he said.
His hunch is that companies are using AI-generated articles to sell advertising or collect data. While some companies, especially in Silicon Valley, are more transparent about their AI use and believe it may be the future of journalism, Mahadevan said news websites using AI-generated text are “defective products.”
Legality is where things get even more complicated. Mahadevan said that, ethically speaking, it is imperative that audiences receive a disclosure when AI is being used. When it comes to fake photos, fake author names or even stories being published under a real person’s name, it can be hard to find the right resolution.
“If some AI tool stole a story that I wrote, and then put my name on it, or rewrote it and put my name on it, I could send a takedown request because there’s a copyright issue there, but newsrooms (usually) aren’t resourced enough to sue over these types of things, and there’s such a high bar because we have the First Amendment and it’s hard to prove that type of thing in court,” Mahadevan said.
As AI is being used more, especially in newsrooms, state legislatures across the country are debating how it should be regulated. But, Mahadevan said he is hopeful that seeing the discrepancies and issues these news sites may create by using AI will make more people turn to legitimate sources.
“I think we are in this transition period where people are maybe not paying as much attention to what they consume online, but once it starts affecting their lives, then they’re going to realize the value of local news,” he said.
‘Local news is supposed to be the history book of communities’
Bassin said he is “ticked off” that there may be a website benefiting from his name and byline.
“If they’re getting any money off of what I’m doing, or what they’re saying I’m doing, I should actually get money from that,” he said.
“I would just like them to be called out for what they’re trying to do and trying to portray people as other people when they’re not.”
Mahadevan emphasized that there are clear distinctions between what a human or AI tool can do, including good quality reporting. Most of what AI pulls from is already out there because of the already-existing work of reporters.
“If someone asks ChatGPT, ‘What is this new development that’s going up across the street?’ somebody has to have done that reporting,” he said. “Somebody has to have asked about it. Someone has to have pulled the development.”
The Northeast Times’ new AI policy addressed this issue Tuesday morning, saying that its reporting from the “AI-assisted team” may not be 100% accurate. Bylines for reporters were replaced from names like Ellen Kowalczyk to the “AI News Team.” However, by Tuesday afternoon, that language had already been taken off the site and bylines were changed to “NewsDesk.”
The challenges that small papers face — including here at Billy Penn — continue to rise. Philly has seen many small outlets shut down over the years. In September, Kensington Voice laid off its team and stopped publishing new articles. ArtBlog, which profiled Philly’s local arts scene, shut down in June 2025.
Unfortunately, many of the Paradise Media news sites associated with Philadelphia and Jersey that we looked into often had a more national focus — such as international politics or celebrity news — topics that Martins said don’t seem to represent the communities they are supposed to be covering. He is disappointed to see the direction local news is headed in.
“Companies need to realize that more goes into crafting a piece of news,” Martins said. “It’s not just letters and punctuation and turns of phrase, but it’s the people that do the work. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes skill, and it’s very hard to live in a world in this profession where people think that content has no purpose.”
It’s the articles whose main purpose seems to be selling advertisements that are the problem. Martins said the articles being put out on some of the company’s websites, including the one written under his byline about Wall Street, are concerning.
“The first thing that really strikes me as someone who used to do community journalism is, while the Dow and the stock market are incredibly important to the overarching economy, this story does nothing to help inform the community,” he said.
Martins said he wishes these local news sites could find their way back to serving their communities.
“Local news is supposed to be the history book of communities,” Martins said. “To see this done this way, it’s extremely galling.”
“What I wish was that there would be more that people would remember that the content that we write or did write in these papers is important, regardless of whether it was written in 2011 or 2026,” he added. “This needs to be a record of what happened and what went down to keep not just that information alive, but to remind people of what mattered to these communities.”
Paradise Media, the company that owns these website domains, did not respond to requests for comment.
Editor’s Note: Paradise Media changed the content of some of their websites after Billy Penn reporters reached out for comment on Nov. 9. Many of the stories we found that do not attribute photographers or authors are still up as of the time of publication for this article.
If you are curious to see how the Paradise Media websites used to look, their content is still archived on web.archive.org. You can find the former versions of the Northeast Times website here, Lower Bucks Times here, Star News Philly here, South Philly Review here and CentralJersey.com here. Links currently inactive in this story may still exist on the archive website.
