Once upon a time, Americans got their local news the traditional way: from a grizzled alcoholic newspaper writer whose low grade PTSD from mainlining the horrors of everyday reality and grudges against different institutions evened each other out. He refined them in clouds of chain smoke and scotch fumes to create a modicum of trusted neutrality.

Those days are gone. Social media played a big part of course, and the late capitalist gutting of institutions finished the work. These days venture capital firms tend to just murder newspapers outright instead of letting them die of old age. Currently, the average American gets most of their news from c-list comedians, influencers and dubious characters on Instagram, or footage on Facebook and Reddit.

Still, some remnants of the weathered industry carry on, so when the organizers of Local News Day, a new effort by a nonprofit to celebrate what’s left of local news, reached out to publications to be included on their Local News Map, we sent them our vital stats. 

But a bit later, when we got a look at the map, we noticed a glaring flaw: Why the hell was Bari Weiss’ website The Free Press on here?

Before she took over CBS, Weiss ran that website and tended to view herself as a champion of free speech and—though much of her early career was spent trying to blacklist academics whose politics ran too strongly against her own self-described “radical Zionism.” Before she ran that site, she was hired by the New York Times, as part of an initiative to incorporate more conservative voices in 2018.

After a year or so of dealing with her, the Times figured her talents would be best put to use on the exact other side of the planet from their offices, so they sent her to Australia. Exiled there, Weiss managed to crack open groundbreaking takes like “Australians Have More Fun,” right before one of the region’s most horrific racial mass murders occurred in neighboring New Zealand. 

Later, back in New York, she resigned from The Times in a dramatic protest that seemed to have more to do with coworkers talking shit about her on slack. “My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in,” she wrote in a lengthy letter she posted online. 

Free at last, Weiss then started what would become The Free Press, an outlet where she could write about stuff like that Star Wars lady who got fired. Marc “Eggman” Andreessen threw them a cool million or two around the time he and various other tech oligarch types were plotting Trump 2.0 in shadowy group chats, and thanks to the magic of venture capital, The Free Press was soon now “worth” hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, after CBS’ parent company was bought by tech nepo-magnete David Ellison, he decided to buy The Free Press for $150 million and installed Weiss at CBS, where she immediately began tanking the network’s credibility and ratings as part of Trump 2.0’s assault on civil society by its gallery of freakish, degenerate hacks.

Weiss’ breed of rank hypocrisy and buffoonishness pays off handsomely in Trumpworld, and Weiss is a nothing if not a buffooness for our times, which is why she now has installed a marble statue of herself at her unaccredited “university” in Texas.

Which is why it was odd to see The Free Press listed on this nonprofit website’s map, like Sauron’s dark tower looming across the way from our humble hobbit hole in the Commie Corridor. It felt like just bad vibes, for a map like this to have .

Aside from all that: they aren’t even local. They do have a writer, an Olivia Reingold, who seems to spend a lot of time zapping herself on the foibles of the early Mamdani administration like a moth on a hot lightbulb. But considering The Free Press’s rabid Zionist roots, it was no surprise they were okay with the idea of helping themselves to someone else’s turf. But Grime Square was feeling territorial, so we contacted the organizers of the website and asked them what the deal was. After not much time, they got back to us with: “Following an internal review, our team has determined that The Free Press does not meet all of our eligibility criteria for inclusion in the Local News Finder. As a result, we’ve moved them from our newsroom listings.”

And that was that. Happily, the map still showcases publications like New York Focus and Documented NY, both of which do great work. True, they negged us a tad on the reader count, but we’re happy to pick up the slack when it comes to De-Barification. Celebrate the first-ever ‘Local News Day’ — or just leave some cheap scotch and a pack of smokes by the door for the Ghost of Local News— you’ll be glad you did.

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Brian Jones Kraft is a writer who has been living in Bushwick for over a decade and a half. Previous subjects of interest include: the Epstein Files, an Italian TV biopic about Benito Mussolini and Andrew Cuomo’s political career.