Let me start by saying: You’re reading an article by a human journalist who spent several years reporting local Austin news by day and peeing in Sculpture Falls by night.
I’m now in Germany studying to earn a master’s degree in journalism. Because of the time difference, it was 10:18pm on a Friday, and I was tipsy on a street corner when my human editor at the Chronicle emailed with a subject line: Potential Story For You. That’s pure catnip to a reporter on her third pilsner. I read the email and heard someone ask why I’d just muttered, “Oh slay, Joe,” under my breath.
Answer: Chronicle Assistant News Editor Joe Ellett had just handed me the gift of a mystery to chase. Who is behind what appears to be an AI news site posing as a local newsroom in Austin?
He asked: “Would you be interested in digging around?”
Say, Joe, I certainly would.
Whodunit
If you’re trying to figure out why an AI site suddenly started pumping out articles in the capital of Texas, your first question has got to be: Who made this?
I had an idea, alright.
Russians.
No, seriously. Think about it: Austin matters politically. A progressive bastion in the country’s largest red state; the capital of the biggest oil producing region; a place where think tanks and lawmakers draft legislation that spreads across the country.
Ellett had started snooping. What he knew: “Apparently, the site was created by Nexcom, which has similar AI news sites for other cities around the state and country.”
Interesting. In the sober morning, I cracked open the ol’ MacBook and typed: TheAustin.org. The front page looked sort of legit. Top-left corner said “The Austin” in gothic script like an old-timey newspaper. From such a legacy paper, you’d expect meaty political articles. Instead, I saw filler stories: petty crime, weather, road closures.
I clicked a story and found … basically nothing. A headline, a photo, a byline, but no story. Weird. I clicked another. Same empty space where the text should be.
This creeped me out. I recalled how in 2024, to pay tribute to reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been imprisoned in Russia for a full year, The Wall Street Journal printed a front page with a giant blank space. Above it: “HIS STORY SHOULD BE HERE.”
Back on task, I found an article with actual text. Byline: Esther Howard. I clicked. Odd: “Esther,” a woman’s name, with an author photo of a man. The bio called him an editor and NYU grad. I searched LinkedIn, MuckRack, Google – no footprint.
A TinEye reverse-image search showed “Esther” is apparently also “Matthew,” a happy participant in a medical trial in a company testing “reprogrammed cells.” He’s also an economist named “Richard” who has great things to say about запчастини для військової техніки. That’s Ukrainian and translates to “military spare parts.” The site guarantees their products “have the necessary quality certificates.”
So is Esther a Russian bot peddling faulty news to Texas and faulty weapons to Ukraine?
Never one to shy away from the meta option, I fought fire with fire and enlisted an AI chatbot, Anthropic’s Claude, to search for evidence of an Esther Howard. Claude replied: “Esther Howard is, to my knowledge, one of the stock placeholder person-names that ships with Untitled UI.”
Untitled UI is like a real, virtual version of the fictional Westworld storage room. There, the theme park’s unused robots stand naked in perfect rows. UI offers hundreds of free avatars. Scrolling their faces, I found two of The Austin’s authors.
So okay, maybe the authors aren’t real, but maybe somebody (like, in an actual body) works here. So I googled The Austin’s purported address: 201 W. Fifth St., 11th floor. No hits for “The Austin” or “Nexcom Media” at that building, but … a shared co-working space? Hmm. I emailed the co-working company and the building’s property managers about The Austin. No response.
I posed a final, burning question to Claude: “How long would it take you and me to build a site just like TheAustin.org?”
Answer: “A rough working version in an afternoon, a convincing single-site clone in a day or two.”
I Know a Guy
University of Texas journalism professor Talia Stroud, an expert on AI news, met me early-morning over Zoom. Our interview fell down a rabbit hole.
I told her The Austin’s contact email address was for Nexcom Media, which listed dozens of news sites mostly in Texas: Waco, Brownsville, Spring, Odessa, on and on.
Stroud asked: “Did someone create this with an eye toward community and informing the public, or did someone create this with an intention of making money? Or is this sponsored by a political party somehow? I think that is very critical information for the public.”
After I told Stroud the Nexcom sites I’d seen weren’t overtly covering politics, she pointed out politics could emerge later, after sites have established readership and archives. I suggested we check out Nexcom’s network right then. We started scrolling its properties together, from opposite sides of the planet.
Many local Nexcom sites looked just like The Austin. Others were more political. A pro-choice site repackaged material from Ms. Magazine and HuffPost Women. A conservative evangelical site copied pieces on tracking abortion medicine in wastewater and the alleged poisoning of a Christian by a Muslim. When attempting to read those articles now, the website provides a pop-up stating “Story not found.”
Lost in the list and hunting for a political thread, I thought out loud: “It’s incoherent to me.”
In the Zoom window, I saw Stroud squinting in sleuth-mode. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m trying to find out if we know anything about who owns this.”
The Founders
When I first reached Nexcom Media, its leadership page listed three co-founders: Dillon Parkes, Galen Kahlenberg, and Kyle Kahlenberg. Since then, Kyle’s name has vanished.
I couldn’t find contact information for these people, although a Texas address seems to exist for one. I also searched all three names on sites that track federal and Texas campaign donations. Nothing.
So, I’d have to interrogate the company itself. I emailed info@nexcom.media on July 20 to request a Zoom. I also listed my questions.
I asked about revenue, authorship, the alleged 1988 founding date … and whether Nexcom followed recent news about the shutdown of Nota News.
Nota News was a similar AI network with 11 sites spanning California to Georgia. It shuttered after questioning from Axios and Poynter, which found over 70 examples of content copied without credit.
Nexcom responded on July 21. Every site in its network had been redesigned overnight.
The Austin website had a new template. Gone was the gothic script. Gone were the avatar author pages. Stories were now marked with sources, mostly CBS and KVUE. The site called itself “AI-assisted.”
Over email, Nexcom told me it has one (unnamed) Austin employee. On the false authors, it said: “During the migration, Nexcom replaced that practice.” Established in 1988? Gone.
Regarding Nota: “It did not initiate Nexcom’s platform migration, but the issues raised in that reporting overlapped with areas examined during our migration review.”
I followed up. What dates were the migration review? What prompted it?
Nexcom responded: “The migration and related review took place during July 2026. The initial migration review was completed on July 20. … It was underway before your inquiry.”
Follow the Money
Full disclosure, I do not know how to do financial forensics yet. Let’s face it, that’s pretty fancy journalism, and one of the things I’m in a master’s program to figure out.
I do know how to send a strongly worded email.
Thankfully, Nexcom responded to my money questions. It said it makes no revenue, and “potential future revenue channels are disclosed at theaustin.org/ownership.”
That new page explains that Nexcom might eventually profit from fees paid by AI crawlers. I followed up: “Is your audience people or AI chatbots?” They said the intended audience is “primarily” human.
But look at the code behind Nexcom sites, and you’ll see they’re chock-full of metatags for AI. On The Austin, 20 metatags are prefixed “ai,” and each is an instruction for machine reading. One uses an MCP server, which serves the sole purpose of connecting AI models to data.
But why? Why feed AI copycat stories when it can already access the originals?
For the Love of the Game
The rumors are true: The United States’ local news ecosystem is in freefall. Since 2005, roughly four in 10 U.S. newspapers have vanished, per the latest Medill School report. Last year, about two or three papers closed every week.
This is the kind of thing that keeps a paranoid reporter up at night. And, apparently, UT law professors, too. “I’m worried about our news and journalism system,” Oren Bracha said, as a leading AI copyright expert at UT. “The AI challenges are real and deep and they go to the core of our democracy. If there is one thing that is clear, it’s that intellectual property rights will not solve them.”
Even before AI comes in, evidence shows losing local news erodes democracy. Researchers find newspaper closures lead to plummeting voter turnout, more political division, less efficient local government, and more corporate misconduct.
Maybe AI newsrooms like Nexcom’s could actually help here – if they were fundamentally different. If they turned City Council agendas into stories, or summarized government reports on local corporations, they could do some watchdog work.
But Nexcom sites don’t do that. Rather than filling news gaps, they may simply siphon readers and revenue from the newsrooms they extract from.
Before “the migration,” Nexcom’s home page claimed 68 million views from roughly 5 million readers. Forty of the network’s 59 publicly claimed sites cover Texas. And, if AI chatbots are spreading its content to their users, the page view count likely undersells Nexcom’s reach in the state.
But, to what end? It seemed impossible to tell.
So I did what any skeptic of a shady operation might do: I looked at the worst AI news offenders already exposed to the light of day. They come in two forms – foreign and domestic.
Russia runs a playbook of creating fake local news sites that feed Western AI chatbots with Kremlin logic, per investigations from Microsoft, Bloomberg, NewsGuard, and the French government.
Meanwhile, Metric Media is a home-brewed poison for our democracy. By 2024, it had created roughly 1,200 sites to boost right-wing candidates and corporate clients, disguised as local news. A Columbia Journalism Review investigation tied Metric to Tea Party founders and a Catholic group that spent over $9 million against Joe Biden in 2020.
Of course, I found no evidence Nexcom fits either model. The company email said its investors are based in Texas, and they’re the only investors.
Here’s the thing: Nexcom doesn’t have to be part of a big diabolical plot for Texans to have a big problem. This state is already a favorite target for high-tech propaganda.
When a Senate Intelligence Committee investigated Russian influence in the 2016 election, it found a troll farm’s most successful effort was a Facebook page called Heart of Texas, with 4.8 million shares. Russia used it to stage dueling rallies outside a Houston mosque in May 2016.
And a human reporter like me, Gwen Howerton, has identified at least two other Texas AI networks operating like Nexcom as we speak. Hoodline runs false quotes and Dotlife Network runs bizarre photos, like the Astros’ Yordan Alvarez “horrifically contorting a bat behind his back.” Howerton calls Nexcom “still AI slop” but “less egregious.”
Over Zoom, when professor Stroud and I had hit a brick wall on Nexcom’s founders, she said this site could be harmless. The problem isn’t that Nexcom is certainly sinister. It’s that it’s hard to tell what it is.
“If any of us wanted to do this, with a $20 subscription to Claude, we could do it pretty quickly,” Stroud told me. “It just opens the floodgates to many, many people with many, many intentions.”
But bad actors in Texas beware: I may be far away, and I may even be slightly tipsy, but I am a real-life human being. And, by God, I am not afraid to use my Texas connections and my Claude subscription against you.
This article appears in August 14 • 2026.
