“AI can help, if it’s built right,” Bushwick Daily publisher Alec Meeker once tweeted. 

In 2018, Meeker bought the local news site with a handful of maxed-out credit cards. It was 2018 and he was just a few years behind the traffic wars and dreams of infinite content. For years, he had a functioning site: an editor, advertising, city revenue, and underpaid freelancers. Even today, he calls himself the site’s founder, which isn’t true, as the site was founded by Katarina Kocses in 2010.

But by 2024, Bushwick Daily collapsed. As reported by Hell Gate at the time, Meeker’s firing of his final editor-in-chief (Andrew Karpan) exacerbated financial issues. Bushwick Daily hasn’t featured a named contributor on the site besides Meeker in over a year. In all of 2025, Bushwick Daily published 27 articles. But, as of last week, Bushwick Daily has published over 700 articles in 2026.

After publishing between 30 and 60 articles per month, Bushwick Daily published 315 articles in June. Then, 98 more articles on July 1. Bushwick Daily publishes almost every article under the “bushwickdaily” byline.

In a white paper titled “NYC News Digest,” Meeker refers to a “morning meeting” in the “Bushwick Daily newsroom” where the “most consequential stories are argued over before assignments go out.” Bushwick Daily appears to be solely operated by Meeker.

In another white paper, he talks about spending the last nine months developing “a comprehensive AI infrastructure,” which has taken the place of any real work. Bushwick Daily is now an AI slop zombie, named after a neighborhood famous for its reverence for the arts and human expression. It has published hundreds of AI-generated articles that show a consistent pattern of dubious citations and outright plagiarism.

This isn’t an aspersion from a disgruntled former editor-in-chief and what passes for his team (Aaron Tomey): Meeker says as much on his own website. Per a white paper published in March, Bushwick Daily is now your “AI-Powered Local Newsroom.”

He has not disclosed this to the site’s 45,000 Instagram followers, 29,000 Facebook followers, or 11,000 Twitter followers. Nor has he disclosed it to his partners: while founder Katarina Kocses still maintains a 10% ownership of the site, she claimed to have no knowledge of Bushwick Daily’s current operations.

Meeker writes that, as “the local news crisis has left communities across America without reliable journalism coverage,” there now exists a vacuum in which “AI infrastructure” can transform “the economics of local journalism by enabling one-person operations to maintain coverage depth.” It appears that he has found a way to operate Bushwick Daily without the burden of “dedicated staff.”

Meeker uses AI as a “force multiplier” to regurgitate press releases when it’s not “monitor[ing] r/Bushwick and conduct[ing] targeted web searches for hyperlocal content not yet in the scraping pipeline.”  In another article, “Prose Is Dead. Local News Isn’t,” Meeker writes that “Local news publications can only survive by original reporting.” There is no original reporting on Bushwick Daily.

With his force of one multiplied, Meeker re-covers anything and everything, most of it not even remotely related to Bushwick—from a Jollibee in the Bronx to a tent giveaway in Marine Park, up to new promises of solar energy at Rikers before heading down on the D Train (notable for not passing anywhere near North Brooklyn).

This appeared to be a strange move from Meeker, who previously kept within the general borders of his corner of North Brooklyn. These days, a substantial part of the site’s coverage appears to be actively ripping off actual hyperlocal news site Greenpointers.

“Previously, I had a pretty high opinion of Bushwick Daily.” said Emma Davey, managing editor of Greenpointers (who is a past Grime Square contributor). “It was nice to know we had a neighboring site who could pick up some of the slack in North Brooklyn.” After the Hell Gate exposé, “My opinion started to slip a little bit, but it’s tough being a local news publication.”

“From my editing perspective,” Davey said of the new Bushwick Daily, “it feels baffling to me. I don’t understand why you want to run this kind of slop on your site. Maybe you’re doing it to drive up traffic, but you’re doing it in a way that everyone can see.”

Davey noted that Bushwick Daily’s Greenpoint coverage heavily cites Greenpointers’ weekly newsletter, rather than individual articles, which aligns with one feature of Meeker’s AI program, an “Email Researcher” that “scans 215+ newsletters and 122+ press releases classified via Gemini Flash.”

With no original local content, Meeker will steal any content. In “Prose is Dead…,” he writes, “AI slop is going to continue creating more and more noise and less signal in the digital journalism space.” His contributions to the noise surface weekly on Google Alerts, outputs from popular LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, and on the front page of Google Search results, largely a result of the site’s domain health and backlog of articles.

Meeker’s “Building an AI-Powered Local Newsroom” details a replicable model for producing news-like content. In the absence of actual work, journalism has to come from somewhere, and he finds it by plagiarizing actual news articles and reposting photos he scrapes from the web (Davey confirmed that Bushwick Daily has republished Greenpointers’ photos without permission). Per his own account, Meeker’s LLM-powered workflow “queries 7 major NYC outlets (Gothamist, Hell Gate, QNS, THE CITY, Bklyner [RIP], Brooklyn Paper, amNY).” 

Here are two clear examples:

On July 14, Brownstoner published an article on the fire that destroyed the South Bushwick Reformed Church (855 Bushwick Ave.). On July 19, Bushwick Daily rehashed it. While mentioning Brownstoner (a Schneps Media property) by name, Bushwick Daily’s article lifts whole phrases from the article, including a line like “suspicious behavior on church property just before the fire broke out,” which appears in both articles.

• In Brownstoner, Cate Corcoran and Anna Bradley-Smith write: “Today, FDNY fire marshals said the cause of the fire is “incendiary,” a department spokesperson told Brownstoner, meaning they are investigating it as an arson.”
• In Bushwick Daily’s arson story, “bushwickdaily” writes: “FDNY fire marshals have declared the cause of the fire at the South Bushwick Reformed Church ‘incendiary,’ meaning the department is investigating it as possible arson, a department spokesperson told Brownstoner on Saturday.”

They are nearly identical with minimal reworking on Bushwick Daily’s part. Brownstoner declined to comment. Bushwick Daily’s coverage of the fire was removed in the days after Brownstoner was notified (an archive of the article can be found here).

In another example, on May 20, City & State ran a story titled “Mamdani’s Office of Community Safety wasn’t at his community safety announcement.” On June 3, Bushwick Daily published “NYC launched Gun Violence Awareness Month in Bed-Stuy, run by a brand-new community-safety office of about five people with no deal with the NYPD yet.”

• City & State’s Holly Pretsky writes: “In reality, the office now has just five full time staff and oversight of a few preexisting programs.”
• Bushwick Daily’s “bushwickdaily” writes: “what he announced in March and stood up is an office that, by City & State’s reporting, runs on roughly five full-time staff and oversight of a few preexisting programs.” 

The clauses are nearly identical. Meeker or his program reworked parts of the text to avoid a fully quoted attribution to Pretsky, while at the same time lifting a whole clause.

City & State editor-in-chief Jeff Cotlin advised that he wasn’t previously aware of Bushwick Daily’s plagiarism. He said, “It’s disappointing to see a once strong outlet give itself up to AI generated news—and even worse, to do so without any apparent disclosure.

“City & State journalists work really hard to report and write wholly original stories, and have built trust with our readers by doing so. We want our work to be read, referenced and shared, but I prefer when people are doing that.”

Closer to home, on April 19, Grime Square published coverage on the reopening of Tiny Arts Supply (6-12 Woodward Ave.). Bushwick Daily had previously posted on March 4 about the move (based on an email from Tiny Arts’ mailing list), but now hosts a link to our reporting to include a quote from Tiny Arts’ owner.

We asked Meeker if he had manually added the quote, or if his AI workflow had edited it automatically. He did not respond directly, but promised “a full response in writing” the following day, which did not come. He also highlighted a February interview with video producer Anthony DiMieri, which he still features prominently on the website, as “the kind of reporting this [AI] infrastructure makes room for.”

As of publication, Meeker has not responded to our questions. But it was nice to hear that a “Provenance-Grounded Research Agent” idolizes us in such ways.

Richard Kim, editor-in-chief of The City, which was also mentioned as a source for Meeker’s AI-powered newsroom, would not comment directly on Bushwick Daily. The City has a generous syndication policy, which allows for republication of their work under Creative Commons licensing. Bushwick Daily plagiarizes work that can be republished for free.

Meeker claims that he adheres to a “human-in-the-loop design” where “AI proposes, humans approve.” But that “human-in-the-loop” posted an AI-generated image of what one can only assume to be Hank’s (613 Bushwick Ave.) on Election Day in 2024, which he ran hours after firing Andrew Karpan. In a later white paper, “The Verification Desk,” oversight and publication are declared to be automatic as well.

The Daily’s current monetization model is ambiguous. This year, Bushwick Daily has published two sponsored posts on Instagram for Brooklyn Electronic Music Festival and Chama Mama. The latter is a Georgian restaurant chain that recently opened an East Williamsburg outpost, and did not respond to a request for comment as to whether or not Meeker disclosed his use of AI to them prior to their partnership.

While the site ran Google AdSense banners in June, by July there did not appear to be any ads. As of publication, Bushwick Daily still has an active subscription where residents can pledge financial support for articles marketed as having been “written in Bushwick” (There are no known hyperscale data centers in Bushwick).

Last year, one revenue source was the Passport to Bushwick for drink tickets at select bars. One bar that wasn’t included on Meeker’s Passport was 101 Wilson, which had previously 86’d Meeker for alleged disparaging remarks that he made about Palestinians. A representative of the bar confirmed that “he [Meeker] absolutely is [still 86’d], although he has attempted to come back a couple times and made a big scene about getting kicked out again.”

Revenue might also come from nonprofits like Youth Journalism Coalition, which features Bushwick Daily on their front page, and receives funding from the NYC Department of Youth Development. Bushwick Daily confirms their partnership here, where it describes high schoolers as being placed into “real, working newsrooms,” of which Bushwick Daily is not one.

Greenpointers was also in talks to partner with YJC in their student internship program, which instead chose to partner with Bushwick Daily, along with the Indypendent and BQE Media (publisher of the Queens Ledger and the Brooklyn Downtown Star, among other papers).

YJC, and its parent organization the Bell, declined to comment for this story. Given Bushwick Daily’s nondisclosure to its audience, it’s possible that YJC had no prior knowledge of Meeker’s AI-powered operations. Due to Bushwick Daily’s nondisclosure, a high school summer project “comparing the price of groceries store to store” in Bushwick and Ridgewood is now tainted by AI slop.

Back in “Prose Is Dead…,” Meeker writes, “Beautiful prose about an incredible bottom-of-the-ninth grand-slam game-winning hit in the playoffs is never going to beat out a video of the real thing.” He adheres to some of his values—by publishing large amounts of AI slop—but can’t follow through on others. Despite prioritizing video, he’s only posted eight videos on Instagram this year. His video highlights include a repost of Taylor Swift at Honey’s (99 Scott Ave.) and participation ribbon attendances at DSA events.

The lack of video hints at operational woes, considering his publishing on “vidtranscript,” a tool that can process clips from “a civic video, a community board meeting,” etc., which he has yet to do.

Instead, his love of video remains theoretical. Meeker writes, “The best investigative journalism I can point to is being done on the right of the aisle. Nick Shirley and James O’Keefe are the two journalists whose recent work I can think of where the reporting itself has produced massive change and follow-on [sic] investigations.”

Shirley harassed Minnesotans on the grounds that they’re Somali. O’Keefe once dressed as a pimp and hyperedited footage to slander a nonprofit. Meeker idolizes far right figures as he praises the NYC DSA and farms engagement at their events.

For all of his talk on the history of writing and whatever an “Error Handling” is, Bushwick Daily’s new iteration is not a new idea. Axios’s reporting on Nota News preceded Nota’s collapse after the LLM/media startup was caught plagiarizing a local Virginia newspaper. Over in Lower Manhattan, an outlet called SoHo Weekly popped up in May, and published articles under bylines that could not be linked to actual people (the project was thankfully short-lived and appears dead as of publication).

This kind of content produces a poisoned ecosystem where LLM-generated content marketed as human is later cited by actual humans. Hoodline, which openly publishes LLM content, still publishes daily in dozens of cities (NYC included), and has been cited by Greenpointers (Note: we attempted and failed to verify that the original Hoodline “author” Quinn Mercer is an actual human being; per Hoodline, as quoted in Nieman Lab, they publish articles under fake, often intentionally ethnic bylines).

Meeker has responded to Bushwick Daily’s 2024 collapse by automating work, and prioritizing the kind of writing that he himself defines as slop. In using AI as a crutch, Bushwick Daily can no longer generate primary source work.

Some believe there are productive use cases. Greenpointers’ Emma Davey said, “I’m not a complete AI hardliner. I think there’s a role for thoughtful, intentional tools that can help local newsrooms in really specific ways, with the proper guardrails in place.” She added that AI tools should “serve as a complement to the work that real journalists are doing, and not a replacement.” There is a fair use case for AI, as with any technology. Despite Meeker’s efforts, Bushwick Daily hasn’t found it.

“Having them [Bushwick Daily] flame out like this,” Emma Davey said, “just feels kind of silly.”

Bushwick Daily is not news, but the simulation of news: without human labor, it should come as no surprise that automatic products have next to no value. Regardless, Bushwick Daily might stick around, shambling. Since a zombie isn’t alive, it can’t exactly die again.

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