NELA-PS: A Dataset of Pink Slime News Articles for the Study of Local News Ecosystems

Abstract

Pink slime news outlets automatically produce low-quality, often partisan content that is framed as authentic local news. Given that local news is trusted by Americans and is increasingly shutting down due to financial distress, pink slime news outlets have the potential to exploit local information voids. Yet, there are gaps in understanding of pink slime production practices and tactics, particularly over time. Hence, to support future research in this area, we built a dataset of over 7.9M articles from 1093 pink slime sources over 2.5 years. This dataset is publicly-available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YHWTFC.