It was a sunny June afternoon in Washington, DC, and even though Tara McGowan professes to hate this city, she was having fun.
A political operative turned publisher, she sat in a conference room in a WeWork office downtown, her fingertips loudly drumming away on the bright orange table. The energetic 36-year-old is the CEO of a company called Good Information, where she oversees a mini empire of progressive local news sites across the United States.
Beaming in on a big videoscreen was Pat Rynard, himself a Democratic operative turned journalist and founder of a small political website called Iowa Starting Line, which The New York Times once declared “the ‘It’ read for political insiders.” McGowan had bought the site from him in 2021, making it the eighth in her growing collection of two- to six-person newsrooms stretching from Arizona to North Carolina.
McGowan believes these outlets are the antidote to bad information—the hyperbole and lies that proliferate in Americans’ social media feeds and promote ideas mostly from the ideological right. Through the calculated injection of news stories into these feeds, McGowan thinks she can claw a crumbling republic back from the brink and—this is the important part—get more people to vote. She’s confident these new recruits to the democratic process will lean decidedly left.
Rynard walked her through an experiment in using Facebook’s powerful ad-targeting tools. Iowa’s primary elections were taking place the next day, and he wanted to know whether a handful of Iowa Starting Line’s stories could shape the results. Primaries are the sort of political contest that both keep democracy afloat and tend to be roundly ignored.
“Remind me when the actual boosting of the coverage started?” asked McGowan, sipping from a giant pink water bottle.
“Three weeks ago,” Rynard replied. Working with a political data shop, McGowan’s team had gotten a list of residents in blue-collar counties in the state’s east. They cut the hardcore Republicans from the list, then dumped the remaining names into Facebook’s ad-buying portal. An analyst used the app’s “lookalike” tool to find other people like them, then bought ads that would appear in those users’ newsfeeds. The ads weren’t selling anything; they were just promoting a few stories from Rynard’s site—straight reporting on Democratic candidates vying to run against sitting US senator Chuck Grassley, an infographic of voting deadlines. So far, Rynard was pleased. One ad he’d tossed in on a whim, which riffed on a story titled “Iowa Passed 70 New Laws This Year. Here’s What They Do,” was clicked on by 3.5 percent of the people who saw it. (Digital ads work on painfully small margins; anything above 2 percent is reason to cheer.)
But the experiment was not about clickthrough rates or reading—it was about whether any of those people would actually show up to vote. After the primary, McGowan’s analysts dug into the data. The Facebook ads had cost them $49,000, which, it turned out, was about what the Democratic winner had spent on the platform. The analysts compared the batch of targeted Iowans with the publicly available list of people who voted. They came back with what they saw as a solid win. About 3,300 more of the targeted residents had turned out to vote than had been forecast to. The ads, they concluded, had worked, and at a reasonable $15 per vote. That’s about what Biden had spent nationally in 2020 while defeating Trump, though he spent more per voter in swing states.
To McGowan, the results validated years of work. She is a longtime proponent of circulating news through ad platforms to shape political thinking. Last election cycle, this “boosted news” technique, along with a suite of data-driven practices and huge sums of fundraised money, helped make her a high-profile if controversial figure in Democratic politics. Now, she says, she has left that world behind for journalism—but brought her political toolbox with her.
In its three years of existence, McGowan’s army of sites—collectively called Courier Newsroom—has spent at least $5 million on Facebook and Instagram ads alone. Backed by billionaire LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, liberal philanthropist George Soros, and others, McGowan says she raised $15 million in the first half of this year—and she’s gunning for more.
McGowan’s critics hate what she’s up to. As Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of the right-leaning nonprofit Americans for Public Trust, puts it, trying to mobilize voters is “just not something newsrooms do.”
McGowan doesn’t disagree. She says that’s precisely the problem. Her argument goes like this: Too many newsrooms have lost their way by catering to elite readers and resorting to paywalls. (A rarity a decade ago, now about three-quarters of US newspapers have them.) Meanwhile, more than 2,000 newspapers across the country have closed since 2004, leaving scores of Americans without the sort of trusted information that might propel them to the polls. Instead, about 80 million people who could have voted in the high-stakes election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden didn’t. To her, it’s self-evident that the journalism world should use every possible tactic to nudge reluctant voters to the ballot box. That idea, though, is breaking the minds of some of journalism’s purists, who worry it could backfire—shattering what remains of the public’s trust in the press.
On McGowan’s left arm is a tattoo, in all caps, of the words “Yes We Can.” She’d asked former president Barack Obama to write his campaign slogan on her skin, then told him mid-scribble of her plan to ink it; the “Can” is noticeably neater. A journalism and political science double major, she had worked for Obama as a digital producer on his 2012 reelection campaign and parlayed that experience into a series of jobs in politics, including as the digital director for NextGen America, the climate change organization founded by billionaire Tom Steyer, and as director of digital strategy for Priorities USA Action, the massive pro-Hillary political action committee.
McGowan built a reputation as a digital expert willing to try new things. She and many others thought the left had grown dangerously complacent since Obama’s internet-powered victory in 2008. After Trump’s upset in 2016, she started an organization called Acronym, which was largely geared toward making sure he and others like him wouldn’t win again. The group came to focus on digital advertising tools and was known for aggressively testing exactly which ads worked and sharing the results with others on the left.
But as McGowan tells it, she hated the churn-and-burn of this work—perpetually raising cash to pour into last-ditch online ads meant to pick off a few persuadable voters. She wanted to create something more lasting. Four years ago, she coauthored a report with Eli Pariser, a progressive organizer best known for his 2011 book The Filter Bubble, which argued that the algorithm-driven internet was trapping Americans in ideological echo chambers. McGowan and Pariser’s report took the position that Democrats were quickly losing power in the United States because they’d neglected to figure out how to navigate that changing landscape. Progressives had opted for bursty spending on TV ads over the right’s investment in “always-on, more digitally fluent media infrastructure.”
McGowan wanted to build that kind of infrastructure. She raised a bit of money to build a pilot demonstration in Virginia, where Democrats had a shot at retaking the legislature. Called Dogwood, after both the state flower and tree, it would be aimed at women living in the suburbs and beyond, a constituency that can swing elections there.
The site started pumping out a mix of politics and lifestyle coverage, very much in the vein of a pre-internet local newspaper. Right away McGowan and her team had to contend with what researchers call Americans’ increasing “news avoidance”—they don’t like to read the news, and they especially don’t like to read about politics.
“Our audiences are not being reached by factual news information,” McGowan tells me when we meet up at DC’s Generator Hotel on one of her visits from her Rhode Island home. It’s imperative, she argues, to chase people wherever they are online. She opened her brown eyes wide and spoke uncharacteristically slowly to make sure I got it: “If we don’t target them, they won’t see it.”
Critics howled about a PAC masquerading as a journalistic outfit. McGowan was undeterred. She secured more money and launched sites tailored to unlikely voters in other political hot spots: Arizona’s The Copper Courier, for Latinas and Indigenous women in Maricopa County; North Carolina’s Cardinal & Pine, for rural communities of color; and Florida’s Floricua, for Puerto Rican women.
The Courier newsrooms rolled along until the winter of 2020. By then Acronym had grown into a massive organization; one offshoot was a campaign tech shop called Shadow, which had won a contract to build an app that could report the Democratic Party’s caucus results. But at the critical moment, it failed, which—when coupled with data errors unrelated to Shadow’s work—delayed results for three days. McGowan took enormous heat in the press and from liberal circles, which she believes was unfair: For one thing, she wasn’t Shadow’s CEO.
McGowan found few defenders in professional Democratic networks, deepening her dislike of DC as an immensely backstabby place. When stories popped up claiming she was trying to throw the caucuses for Pete Buttigieg, for whom her husband worked, she felt she got a lesson in how quickly bad information spreads.
But McGowan says even she knew she needed to focus. She recalls Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe, then on Acronym’s board and a powerful fundraiser, telling her to learn from Republicans: Nothing of lasting significance had ever been built from inside that party’s establishment. She raised a bit of new money and left Acronym, taking Courier Newsroom with her.
Freshly humbled, McGowan set about rebooting Courier. She came to accept the notion that you can’t be a trusted news organization while being secretive about your donors, and she dug into cleaning up its reputation.
She was in the middle of a long-running fight with a company called NewsGuard. Started in 2018 in part by well-known journalist and Court TV founder Steven Brill, NewsGuard existed to fight the country’s growing misinformation problem with human editorial judgment. The company evaluated online content shops and awarded them red or green ratings. As Brill put it at the time, NewsGuard would take on “a growing scourge that clearly cannot be solved by algorithms.”
At NewsGuard’s launch, Brill’s cofounder had said that their aim was to “tell readers The Denver Post is a real newspaper and that the Denver Guardian exists only as a purveyor of fake news.” It’s a tough job: While The Denver Post might be a local institution now, it was founded in 1892 as a Democratic organ. To apply a measure of science to that messiness, NewsGuard scores sites on nine criteria. Early on, Courier earned only a 57 out of 100. “This website fails to adhere to several basic journalistic standards,” concluded NewsGuard’s evaluators.
They objected to just about everything: Courier’s way of gathering and presenting information, its handling of the difference between news and opinion, and the inadequacy of its disclosures of who owns it, how it’s financed, who’s in charge, and what its conflicts of interest might be. They slapped the sites with a red rating. Meanwhile, some prominent, proudly right-wing sites fare better: The Daily Wire, for example, cofounded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, scores a 69.5 and a green rating. When I pressed Brill on what made Courier less legit, he replied that The Daily Wire is “fairly explicit about what they do and don’t do.”
McGowan wanted another shot. In January 2021, she and Brill joined a Zoom call to hash it all out. According to McGowan, the meeting devolved into “a screaming fight.” Brill recalls that McGowan was “condescending, patronizing,” and “self-righteous,” all while engaging in doublespeak. “She talked about how her life’s work is rebuilding trust in institutions,” Brill says, “when her life’s work is undermining trust in what I consider to be the most cherished institution we have, which is the press.”
He’s not alone in that view. When I refer to Courier as a news organization in a conversation with Peter Adams, an executive at the nonprofit News Literacy Project, he quickly cautions me against it. His organization, he says, “is pretty careful with the way we use the word news,” reserving it for those who “strive to be as fair and accurate and transparent as possible.” Courier, Adams said, has only “posed” as such. He and Brill continue to object to McGowan’s political roots.
Emily Bell, the founding director of Columbia Journalism School’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, is less damning of Courier, at least for now. She oversees studies of “pink slime”—purely partisan outlets masquerading as local news shops. Courier isn’t that, Bell says. But she’s unconvinced it’s truly independent. “It’s too early to tell,” she says. “We’re in a period of intense change” regarding “how we target stories and how people receive, share, and discuss news.”
In the fall of 2021, McGowan was having breakfast in Lower Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel with an NYU journalism professor named Jay Rosen. McGowan wanted the journalism world to take her seriously, and Rosen seemed like a potential ally. He was known for his argument that the news-business norm of the “view from nowhere”—the pretense that journalists operate with no bias or even lived experience—doesn’t serve the public. He came to breakfast skeptical of Courier. But he’d been incubating an idea for a new sort of transparency device: a statement of beliefs that would articulate a news organization’s actual agenda. He hoped it might help revive the public’s trust in the media. Says Rosen, “I wanted to see: How hard is this going to be in practice?”
Over the course of that autumn, Rosen worked with Courier’s newsrooms to write up manifestos of sorts detailing what each stood for. One newsroom came out in support of workers’ rights; another stood up for abortion access. The statements are varying degrees of explicit, but all try to flesh out what their liberalism means in practice.
Posted on each newsroom’s website, the statements aren’t likely to make their way to many readers, few of whom can be expected to click on the sites’ About pages. But the statements are there, and McGowan reasonably argues that their mission articulation—plus disclosures about Courier’s funding—go beyond what many news organizations do. With the statements in place, one of her staffers fired off an email to NewsGuard.
But Brill was unmoved. Courier’s red rating would stay for now. “It’s ridiculous,” McGowan says. She decided to move on.
she had to build an audience fast if she wanted Courier’s newsrooms to make a mark on the 2022 midterm elections. One obstacle was that Democrats lack some of the right’s obvious cultural signifiers—being pro-hunting, churchgoing, antiabortion. (Opposing them has not proven all that galvanizing.) So her editors rely heavily on sense of place. “How do you build bridges with people who don’t care about politics? Identity. The right uses cultural identity,” McGowan says. She could do the same. “What is unifying? Sports teams. State pride.”
Her editors learned quickly that they got the most subscribers from local, cultural coverage—not straight politics—so the sites crank out lifestyle stories: the best places to spot rare birds, a ranking of Iowa’s best gas-station breakfast pizzas, a profile of the Black-owned barbecue spot in a tiny North Carolina town that became the only place to eat after a hurricane hit. After pouring money into making videos for TikTok, McGowan was pleased to see Courier find some traction there: In August alone, Iowa Starting Line’s videos racked up 2 million views. When the time is right, Courier slips in a politics story, such as one on the Republican politicians who voted against funding meant to address the baby formula shortage.
What Courier stories don’t really include, though, is partisan red meat. Sometimes they explicitly emphasize progressive values, as in an interview in Michigan’s The ’Gander in which faith leaders discuss how abortion access is part of their religious traditions. It’s an attempt, the site’s Grand Rapids–based editor says, to counteract the “Michigan nice” quality of women in the state that leads them to avoid tough political conversations. It’s also, less obviously, a challenge to the idea that abortion is widely controversial, when public opinion polls show that more than half of Americans support it being broadly legal.
Such sly liberalism is by design. James Barnes, Acronym’s former measurement czar, joined the organization in 2019 to swing voters away from Trump, having previously embedded with the Trump campaign as a Facebook employee. Barnes remains one of McGowan’s confidants, and he says a takeaway from his experience is that you don’t have to hammer an audience with talking points: “People who are more informed about what’s going on are more skeptical, harder to convince of nonsense.”
Still, getting them to vote takes an extra step. People also need to believe that engaging in politics does them some good, says Leticia Bode, a Georgetown professor and expert on political communication. A withered sense of political efficacy is a sign of an unhealthy civil society. And at last check, almost half of all Americans say there’s not much ordinary citizens can do to influence how the government runs.
That’s why, barreling toward the US’s midterm elections, Courier is pumping out stories to counter that fatalism. The Copper Courier wrote about how Latino voters in Arizona had helped Biden become the first Democrat to win the state since Bill Clinton. Cardinal & Pine showed how, in a “rare bit of bipartisanship,” North Carolina members of Congress had pushed the Treasury Department to ease restrictions on using Covid-19 funding for affordable housing. Deign to pick your elected leaders and here’s what they can do, goes the thinking. To make sure those stories reach their intended audiences, McGowan isn’t relying only on ads; she’s hiring what she calls content organizers to tap the social networks of their would-be allies—nonprofit groups, mostly—to help distribute stories as part of what they’re calling Good Info Messengers.
“The best antidote to disinformation,” McGowan says, “is increasing the volume of good, factual information” in the places where low-quality information is spreading. It’s a stark departure from the assumption long held in Congress, Silicon Valley, and European capitals that the answer is content moderation by the platforms themselves. Damon McCoy, an engineering professor at NYU, helps run the school’s Cybersecurity for Democracy project, which tries to identify and offer solutions to vulnerabilities in online platforms that let misinformation spread. “One of the things that’s starting to dawn on us,” he says, “is that misinformation takes hold where there’s a lack of credible news sources.” In those news deserts, what people find “is fly-by-night, opportunistic misinformation and disinformation campaigns.”
McCoy says injecting local news into those information vacuums makes sense to him, but he points out the obvious catch: Local journalism isn’t cheap. The free market has largely failed to pay for it, so McGowan has found a way to pull money from the political realm to help foot the bill. For now.
Which raises the question of what funders want. Dmitri Mehlhorn is a political adviser to Reid Hoffman, the venture capitalist and LinkedIn cofounder. Shortly after Trump took office the two started a funding group called Investing in US, aimed at funding entrepreneurs on the left. Mehlhorn has argued that Trump was the master manipulator of a press that bent over backward to prove its objectivity. Like McGowan, Mehlhorn gets criticized for using tactics that “might cause us to become like those we are fighting,” he says. But he thinks experimentation is necessary to get at “the low-information voters Tara is trying to reach.”
McGowan, for her part, worries that donors like Hoffman will judge the threat of Trump as over and move on, taking their money with them. So far, Courier says it has 900,000 subscribers across Facebook, Instagram, and its email lists, with more than 35 journalists—including about a dozen on a central team supporting the local newsrooms—pumping out some 400 pieces of content a week. But McGowan knows she’ll have to go far bigger to justify everything she and others have been investing in Courier.
If Good Information’s strategy seems to stand on wobbly ground, there’s a reason. McGowan’s project perches atop a series of complex bets—all of which need to pay off for her to succeed.
Her first and biggest wager is that news consumption can shape how people vote. It’s informed by a landmark 2006 study on what its authors called the Fox News effect. The researchers found that once the 24-hour-a-day conservative cable channel showed up in markets across the country, its steady drip of coverage was enough to convince 200,000 people to vote Republican who otherwise wouldn’t have—enough to make George W. Bush president.
Her next bet has longer odds but is backed up anecdotally and by top Democrats. The idea is that Republicans have spent decades studying the news consumption habits of would-be voters and building media relationships with them through wildly popular sites like The Daily Wire, which has about 33 million monthly visitors, and Breitbart, which has roughly 80 million. Democrats have nothing even close—the biggest might be MSNBC.com, with about 22 million monthly visitors. Jason Goldman is a former Twitter executive and White House chief digital officer who says that’s the reason he joined Good Information’s advisory committee. “There’s a whole world of voters we’re just not talking to,” he says.
Her next assumptions become more of a series of leaps. McGowan argues that Americans are turned off from voting because of a rise in misinformation—such as the idea that Trump won the 2020 election—and a decrease in good information, the straightforward reporting that helps citizens understand who their local representatives are. Certainly Americans’ trust in Washington to “do what is right” has been on a slow decline since the Kennedy era, and charts tracking the metric since 2000 resemble lemmings plunging off a cliff. But can more reporting help reverse the decline? That’s hard to prove.
McGowan’s belief that Democrats will win if she can simply get more people to vote isn’t outlandish, but it depends hugely on which voters are turned out where. That they will trend left is a piece of Democratic conventional wisdom, not a fact of life. And the biggest bet—that people can be convinced to turn out if only they have more fairly dry information, only loosely ideological in thrust—is at this point the gamble of her career.
This summer, McGowan had a meeting with White House chief of staff Ron Klain. (“An old friend,” Klain calls McGowan in an email.) Heading to the meeting, she tells me she sees President Biden clinging to an old model, where to break through with the public he just needs to win over a handful of national reporters at traditional big-name institutions. “He still lives in a world a lot of the people I meet live in, which is, ‘It was better before. Why can’t we just do that again?’” she says.
She went in intending to ask if the White House might open up a bit to Courier’s journalists, to help “lift up information about the impacts of the infrastructure bill, things of that nature.” She declines to discuss the details of her conversation with Klain, but she says she came out of the meeting feeling like the administration’s messaging struggles are an opportunity for Courier, if she can convince top progressives to give her a chance.
I offhandedly mention to her that just that morning, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had said, “The thing people need to understand about these legacy DC, New York outlets is: We don’t care what you think anymore.” To me it seemed a bit of Republican bluster about the irrelevance of the mainstream press. But to McGowan, DeSantis is savvily reading the landscape: He gets what he needs from Fox News, Breitbart, and the like. She says she’ll judge that Courier has failed if, in a few years—around the time of the 2024 elections—her newsrooms don’t occupy a similar space.
The stakes, though, are a fair bit higher. At issue is not so much the future of journalism as the future of cynicism. In her own, fraught way, McGowan is testing whether it’s still possible to combat the noise ceaselessly filling Americans’ heads and hammering the message that apathy is a reasonable response to the state of the world. The alternative—that citizens are fated to only grow more disconnected from the news of the day and less invested in the country’s fate—is almost too distressing an outcome to contemplate.
This article appears in the November 2022 issue. Subscribe now.
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