On Jan. 7, I received an email from a Royal Caribbean International communications person asking for a correction to a story. The request said that I had used an image of Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas cruiseliner in a story about a death on the Carnival Horizon ship, and asked if I could replace the image given that Royal Caribbean wasn't involved. A fair ask, for sure, but not something I could help with: The story was one I didn’t write, on a website I don’t write for.
When I clicked the link included in the email, I was surprised to see the byline was indeed Nicole Carpenter. The story appeared on MSN, Microsoft’s news aggregator, but was connected with the Tri City Herald, a McClatchy publication. There was no link to see what else Nicole Carpenter had written, nor was there a contact email attached. Just a note at the bottom: "This story was reported by content partner Modern Newsstand LLC."
I am somewhat familiar with the other Nicole Carpenters of the world. I've looked at the various online profiles that come up when I've Googled myself. Besides Nicole Carpenter the reporter who covers the video game industry (me), there's Nicole Carpenter the actor, Nicole Carpenter the women's leadership advocate, Nicole Carpenter the realtor, Nicole Carpenter the beach volleyball player, Nicole Carpenter the pest control expert. It's typically me and Nicole Carpenter the actor who take up the majority of the space on Google's first page of results, at least when I search.
I was intrigued to learn that there was another Nicole Carpenter the journalist. But after spending the last week or so looking for her, I'm not sure whether Nicole Carpenter the other journalist is even real.
Modern Newsstand has no online presence, but a company of the same name is registered as an LLC in Delaware and was incorporated in 2024. I reached out to Justin Levine, who lists himself as the CEO of Modern Newsstand on LinkedIn, to tell him that I'd been contacted by a confused communications person. He responded in a LinkedIn message: "Yes, this has come to our attention. Given your success and prominence in the industry, we have advised our writer to update her byline, bio and contact info for greater distinction. We will either use a middle name or make further adjustments." I asked him to confirm that she's a real person, and he hasn't responded.
But in the days after I reached out to Levine and then to McClatchy's communications person, rather than update Nicole Carpenter’s byline, all of her stories were removed from MSN. The pages now read, "This story is unavailable," and not only has Nicole Carpenter not posted a news story since, but it seems like Modern Newsstand has stopped posting on MSN as well. I don't know if stories being removed is common with MSN-syndicated stories, because I've found other links that don't work. Some of Nicole Carpenter's stories remain on another syndication service, NewsBreak, and they're all the same as what was on MSN. I've reached out to Microsoft, which owns MSN, and they haven't responded.
While Nicole Carpenter’s MSN-syndicated stories are connected to the Tri City Herald and other McClatchy publications, none of them appear on the actual Tri City Herald website, nor does her byline show up there. I reached out to McClatchy on Jan. 7, after the Royal Caribbean communications person emailed me. On Jan. 15, I got a response from McClatchy chief revenue officer Tony Berg. Berg didn't have much information about the Modern Newsstand operation, but he confirmed that McClatchy had a deal with the company to post content, tied to its brands, to syndication platforms like MSN and NewsBreak, and that McClatchy gets paid per views on those syndication platforms. He said that McClatchy had no control over the stories. (Previously a McClatchy spokesperson, in an email acquired by Aftermath, had said the stories were "produced by Modern Newsstand but reviewed by McClatchy editors.")
Berg also told me that in the past week or so McClatchy had stopped working with Modern Newsstand and that it's no longer a vendor of the media company. "We have no tolerance for people that are not following policies of what our vendor agreements are, and in this case, that was not being done," Berg told me.
Berg didn’t say what policies Modern Newsstand didn’t adhere to. And I’m not sure whether McClatchy learned of the issue through my email or had concerns previously. I asked Berg if Modern Newsstand used artificial intelligence to write the stories, and he said he didn’t know and said I'd have to ask Modern Newsstand. Berg said McClatchy didn't remove the stories from MSN, because the company has no control over the stuff that's published there.
There seems to be a small stable of bylines under Modern Newsstand, and the majority of them have the names of other verifiable journalists. I haven’t been able to find a profile or portfolio using any of those names that list Modern Newsstand, and I didn’t receive a reply from any of the verifiable journalists who shared names with Modern Newsstand writers who I reached out to. At the same time, many of the Modern Newsstand names are ones that are at least somewhat common, making it hard to tell whether this overlap is intentional. Many Modern Newsstand stories are still available on MSN; it's largely the Nicole Carpenter ones that have gone entirely missing. No new stories were published this week, however, which makes sense, since McClatchy cut ties.
The stories that Nicole Carpenter and the other Modern Newsstand journalists wrote are largely about national politics. They're very short, and always based on another publication's work with no backlinks to the source. They make heavy use of quotes, which sometimes comprise the majority of the story. They're not particularly well-written or interesting, though some of them get a ton of comments on MSN and NewsBreak. I haven't noticed any egregious errors, but I did find a user on Bluesky who had reached out to McClatchy after claiming to spot an error in a Modern Newsstand story that described Kamala Harris as the president, which they thought was weird, and possibly an AI mistake. (That story is no longer available to read.) They’re not the sort of stories I'd expect to see on reputable, local newspapers and publications.
I don't know a lot about what's going on here, but I do know that these are not stories I want associated with my byline. On MuckRack, which is a website that automatically makes portfolio pages for journalists, MSN is listed under my "As seen in" section, which might cause someone to think I wrote those stories. However, some of my actual stories have also been syndicated on MSN, through Polygon.
At best, this is all a very weird misunderstanding, and there's simply another journalist named Nicole Carpenter who has no online presence whatsoever, and works for a very mysterious content provider. At worst, Modern Newsstand is using the names of verifiable journalists to make its work look trustworthy. Somewhere in the middle, Modern Newsstand chose random pseudonyms to publish some of its stories under, one of which happened to be the same name as mine. And if, for some reason, Modern Newsstand chose to use my name, why? I don't cover national politics, unless they relate, somehow, to the video game industry. I'm not particularly well-known outside of my own beat. It doesn't make sense. (Nicole Carpenter the other journalist, if you are real and reading this, I'm sorry I said your work isn't particularly well-written.)
While I still can’t say for sure what’s going on here, the whole strange situation feels like it highlights the ways it’s harder than ever to know what news sources to trust. And while there’s no indication that Modern Newsstand’s stories are created by AI, I definitely wondered. McClatchy itself has been accused of using artificial intelligence to create curated listicles summarizing McClatchy stories, which its union is pushing back on. Earlier this month, the day I got the correction request, media publication Status reported on a meeting with McClatchy leadership and the union in which the company "blindsided" the journalists with "the company's desire to aggressively integrate artificial intelligence into its workflow."
I still have a lot of questions, so if you know anything more about Modern Newsstand, please reach out. It’s hard not to look at this whole situation and just long for a human journalist, with a byline and photo, writing an article at a real outlet. It's a bad time out there for real journalists.
