Where would the news be without us?

Everybody wants to be in the news business when they define “news” as repeating what’s already bouncing off the echo chamber walls, but not enough people are thinking about the quality of that sound.

By Yvonne Mintz, TPA president 2026-27

There is no replacement for local journalism, but nameless, faceless forces among us are attempting to give the illusion that there is. They’re taking the work we pay journalists to produce and using it as their own.

This isn’t new, of course, but AI expansion over the last year has made old groans of competitors ripping and reading our news on their air seem quaint by comparison.

This became abundantly clear last month when our local sheriff experienced a tragedy in his family and it became statewide news that started with a story I wrote.

The sheriff’s 21-year-old son suffered from heat stroke and rhabdomyolysis during an intense workout in College Station. Word the young man was fighting for his life started spreading online.

Because we have an established source relationship that dates back years, the sheriff trusted us enough to leave his son’s hospital room to call and tell me about his son’s condition and ask our community to pray for his boy.

As the county’s news source and its leading law enforcement officer, we have disagreed many times. The paper has asked hard questions and called his department out in editorials when it did not disclose information on cases when we thought they should. In fact, I did so at a state committee hearing and in this column last month. We have written plenty of stories the sheriff and his staff would have preferred we not. Still, we have not played gotcha with him or been unfair, so a mutual respect exists.

Interest in the story about the sheriff’s son has been high, not just in Brazoria County, but across the state.

No less than eight AI scrapers took my work, exclusive quotes and all, barely rewrote it, and presented it without attribution on social media sites not tied to any real media outlet I could find. One television station did almost the same thing, only at least attributed they the work to “Yvonne Mintz, reporter at The Facts.”

They did so free to all users, in front of a paywall, no subscription needed. It’s the kind of thing that makes our value proposition to subscribers a harder sell.

I’m sure everyone in our industry can relate, and this isn’t meant so much a whine as it is a cautionary tale. A story about a young man in our community in a health crisis is nothing to be proprietary about, but it got me thinking.

What we do for our communities is obvious to us. We make them better places to live, we hold power to account, we tell stories that otherwise would go untold.  It’s more important than ever that we preach that value to people who should know but aren’t yet members of the choir.

Why? Well take your pick of a ton of valid reasons, but consider this one: What would fill the echo chamber without us? What would the AI have to scrape? Would it be accurate, fair, probing and balanced?

Elizabeth Green, CEO and founder of Civic News Company, spoke at the International Symposium on Journalism in Austin in September and put it this way: We are in the business of independent thinking at a time when independent thinking is considered countercultural.

There are plenty of ways to find out what is going on in the world. Journalism can create or exacerbate a hall of mirrors reporting about anxieties. The easiest path is to report on the world’s anxieties without context, Green said in Austin. It’s a lot harder to seek understanding of what’s going on in the world and in our own communities.

It’s up to journalists, good ones, to “puzzle through,” in Green’s words, the press releases, prepared statements, documents and other records to get our readers the answers they need to make sense of it all.

Our job is to explain, and in our current news environment our story is among those we have to tell the loudest. If we didn’t, we have to wonder if any independent source would.

Yvonne Mintz is publisher of The Facts in Brazoria County and vice president of content for Southern Newspapers. She is president of the Texas Press Association and vice president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. Email her at Yvonne.mintz@thefacts.com.