The top Republican campaigns in Illinois used a private online portal last year to request stories and shape coverage in a network of media outlets that present themselves as local newspapers, according to documents and people familiar with the setup.
Screenshots show that the password-protected portal, called Lumen, allowed users to pitch stories; provide interview subjects as well as questions; place announcements and submit op-eds to be “published verbatim” in any of about 30 sites that form part of the Illinois-focused media network, called Local Government Information Services.
In some cases, users with Lumen access could choose whether to add a fact-checking step, screenshots obtained by The Washington Post show. Campaigns could findfeedback about the stories they had submitted within the portal, including online views and the kinds of audiences reacting to the content, according to people with access to Lumen who, like most others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive details.
The online portal offers the potential for a new level of collaboration between political operators and certain media outlets — one in which candidates can easily seek to customize news stories without the public’s knowledge. The use of the tactic in Illinois has caught the attention of allies of former president Donald Trump, who have discussed the potential of expanding the operation, according to people familiar with the discussions.
The network is run by Brian Timpone, a businessman and former television broadcaster who told federal regulators in 2016 that his publishing company was filling the void left by the decline of community news, “delivering hundreds and sometimes thousands of local news stories each week.” He did not respond to requests for comment.
The Illinois-centric outlets form just one part of a broader network of sites, estimated to number more than 1,200 nationally, that the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University has connected to Timpone. The Lumen portal shares technical features, including an online performance tracking ID,with multiple sites that form part of what Priyanjana Bengani, a fellow in computational journalism at the Tow Center, described as Timpone’s extended network.
I wrote about these troubling new entities in Cheap Speech. Democrats had a much smaller operation, but were doing their own thing through Courier. And the Russian government tried to get in on the act too. This will only grow.