Deb Paul is the publisher of a small-market newspaper in southern New Hampshire. When a local business owner received an unfamiliar newspaper in the mail, he alerted her about this new competition. Paul’s son received a copy as well.

“He’s like, ‘You’ve got competition,’” said Paul about her acquaintance. “There’s a new paper.”

Households are inundated with mailings before elections, but Paul is not a typical recipient. Her heightened awareness of what constitutes political advertising led her to doubt the Rockingham Times’s validity.

In 2023, Paul, publisher of the weekly Londonderry Times, was found guilty of five misdemeanor charges that she ran advertisements for local campaigns without properly marking them as political advertising and saying who paid for them, as required by state law. She was fined $620 after a highly publicized bench trial.

So, she said, after seeing a copy of the Rockingham Times, “I was like, oh my God, is this a new newspaper? I looked at it and I’m like, this is weird. Where’s the editor? Where’s the publisher? Where’s the owner? Where are the reporters? There’s no listing.”

Despite its New Hampshire-sounding name, the Rockingham Times is published by Chicago-based Metric Media, a company founded in 2019 that publishes over 1,000 conservative-leaning websites that are designed to look like they’re locally based.

Metric Media is among a breed of publishers whose output is disparaged for their resemblance to “pink slime” — a derogatory term to describe the meat by-product used as a low-cost beef filler. The phrase has also come to describe partisan media posing as legitimate journalism.

The issue mailed to Paul, dated “October 2026,” included multiple articles focused on “illegal aliens,” including a large array of mug shots. Additional articles slanted toward conservative perspectives, including “Sununu: ‘Raising someone’s taxes never made anything more affordable’”; “Reports raise questions about Pappas’ Uber ties amid anti-corruption campaign”; and “Pappas declines to condemn democratic socialism in WMUR interview.”

The paper also included innocuous pieces, ranging from bird sightings at Odiorne Point and coverage of community events, including a Chamber of Commerce exposition at a local high school.

The Oct. 29 online edition featured 13 summaries of social media posts by N.H. Rep. Joe Sweeney, a Salem Republican, and four by N.H. Rep. James Spillane, R-Deerfield. There were none from politicians of other parties.

A Media Bias/Fact Check analysis in 2025 concluded, “The Rockingham Times is an imposter site, lacks transparency, and publishes false information. As a result, we rate them right-center, biased, and questionable.”

Seven others, too

The Rockingham Times is not the only such website in New Hampshire. Metric Media operates seven others in the Granite State: the Concord Ledger, the Dartmouth Times, the Hillsborough Sun, Lake Region News, North Country Reporter, Strafford News and SW New Hampshire News. All have look-alike designs and feature very similar, often identical content.

The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University examined the pink slime phenomenon in a 2023 report that characterized Metric Media as pushing “Republican candidates and far-right talking points.”

Overall, however, Medill’s report concluded that pink slime sites had limited impact.

“People are not dumb,” said Nikki Usher, an associate professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego. “They can make assessments about media bias. We do it all the time.”

Usher also thinks the “pink slime” label might be overkill. “I think we should just call these sites what they are, which are Republican-backed local news sites that are strategic political communication,” Usher said.

NewsGuard’s Midterms Misinformation Briefing identifies both left- and right-leaning pink slime sites. NewsGuard has found 1,181 of these faux news sites, outnumbering the 987 professional daily newspapers still in existence.

Their role in the dissemination of fake news is substantial; when leading AI chatbots were queried about midterm candidates and issues, nearly half responded with citations to pink slime sites, NewsGuard found.

In a 2025 study, Chau Tong, an assistant professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics, found rough equivalence in left- and right-leaning pink slime sites. “There is no clear, systematic evidence of political bias,” Tong said. “What we’re seeing so far is that there is not much difference between the left and the right in terms of coverage.”

Political advertising in traditional newspapers must be clearly labeled as such, but the apparently slanted content of The Rockingham Times and similar publications lack these warnings.

“I’m not aware of anything in federal law that would prohibit sending people political content that isn’t disclosed as such,” says University at Buffalo Professor Jacob Neiheisel, whose scholarship focuses on political communication.

In New Hampshire, RSA 664 governs Political Expenditures and Contributions, with Section 664:14 stipulating rules regarding Political Advertising. Whether the Rockingham Times and similar publications should be subject to these or other rules is a question that will not be answered before this year’s election.

It’s a question, however, that Deb Paul believes is important and deserves an answer.

“It just stuck out to me,” Paul says. “It’s a little propaganda piece and it doesn’t matter what party you’re in.”