In the Pink
How print publications retained their power in one weird little corner of the world
When you think about propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation, you probably think about online communication. After all, we’ve spent years hearing about Cambridge Analytica, Russian bots on social media, and manipulated algorithms on X and elsewhere. It’s massive and it’s all been online.
Weirdly, though, print has retained power as a tool, especially when focused on the behavioral patterns of specific target audiences.
Exhibit A: pink slime, and how it exploits trust.
I first heard about pink slime in the context of processed meat. Pink slime is ground-up meat slush that is used as a filler in hamburger and other stuff. Pink slime is not actual meat—it’s a sort of byproduct that blends right in. It’s gross.
There is another kind of pink slime. It’s also gross, and it leverages established behavioral habits.
Over a decade ago, a journalist named Ryan Smith applied the ‘pink slime’ term to media entities that masquerade as legit even though they ignore journalistic ethics and practices. These media publications also use ground-up meat—stuff that looks like news but usually isn’t—to fill in around the real deal in people’s minds. What’s crucial here is understanding the target audience’s existing media consumption behavior.
Many pink slime entities are online—after all, it’s cheap to throw up a site. But print is the better strategy when you want to tap into established trust behaviors. (Real) journalist Miranda Green documents it in a longish Thread with pics of nearly identical local print pubs across the country, showing how design plays on familiar behavior.
The strategy is clever and arguably diabolical, and it's all about understanding and exploiting behavior:
Identify an underserved customer: people who depended for decades on now-defunct local print media publications for news. Older, yes, and with a high propensity to vote. This is about identifying established information-seeking behavior.
Mimic the brand identities of traditional local print pubs through design. People always underestimate the importance of design; here it’s used to build trust. The target audiences grew up with trusted local newspapers as a primary source of information. This is leveraging ingrained trust behaviors.
Minimize cost by using AI and other automation to generate content. This is a cost-saving measure made possible by understanding the target audience’s information consumption habits and the type of content they consume.
Attract funding from wealthy political partisans. Thanks to #3, it doesn’t take much. This is about funding a strategy that preys on specific behavioral patterns—an easy sell to admirers of Cambridge Analytica.
For decades, people have classified the decline of local newspapers and other local print publications as the end of an era—and a terrible business. But what if you have a different goal, one that has nothing to do with a profitable bottom line but everything to do with influencing behavior?
In that case, the residual trust associated with once-credible local print publications is the perfect channel for partisan messaging, and it all comes down to understanding and manipulating established behavioral patterns.