Anxiety over the fate of the Santa Barbara News-Press spreads beyond old-timers used to washing newsprint off their fingers to a younger generation adept in searching source code, of all things.
The once-daily newspaper’s website is up for sale on Tuesday, April 9, with consequences likely to be that of the Clayton County Register in Iowa and the Southwestern Journal in Minnesota, which became shells to hold other content, often AI generated, known as zombie websites. The current bidder for the bankrupt News-Press website, however, Max Noremo of Weyaweya Ltd., said his plan is to re-sell the domain names and the contents.
William Belfiore, who grew up in Santa Barbara before heading to the East Coast for college several years ago, doesn’t want to see his hometown’s more-than-a-century-old daily turn into a backlinks farm. He and his cousin Zachary Grimshaw began to dig to for more about Weyaweya, a company registered in Malta that has put in a bid of $250,000 for the online News-Press. They tracked it from one website to another and finally to one called Link.Builders.
“The ownership is Swedish nationals, and many of them live in Spain,” said Belfiore, who provided copious documentation of the research. “We don’t know what they’ll do with the News-Press, but in their online materials they explain their business model.” That model is to buy legitimate websites and turn them into zombie sites by filling them with paid backlinks that lead to third-party websites, a profitable loop that Belfiore describes at an editorial posted here.
At about the time the two figured out Weyaweya, Ernie Smith at the online publication Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet wrote about the purchase of the sports blog Deadspin by a Maltese company. College football enthusiasts might recall that Deadspin broke the Manti Te’o “Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist” story in 2013. (The Notre Dame linebacker achieved great success and acclaim on the field after his grandmother and “girlfriend” died on the same day; Deadspin’s reporters discovered that Te’o had been catfished, and the girlfriend was a hoax by a man in Seattle.)
Deadspin had been bought in March by Lineup Publishing, a company that Smith determined had been set up five days earlier. He tracked the company through its IP address to a “Finnish casino splog,” or spam blog. About a week later, journalist Michael Greshko wrote at 404media.co that he’d found the name Max Noremo buried in the source code for Lineup Publishing. Noremo is associated with a number of companies that specialize in search engine optimization (SEO) — or constructing website content so that it comes to the top in an online search — a number of them related to gambling, which is a healthy industry in Malta.
Belfiore had noticed Noremo’s name in a bankruptcy court document announcing the sale of the News-Press website. Noremo’s email address on the proof of service is RedEarth.Ltd, a tech company “active within iGaming, Trading/Forex and e-commerce,” according to its website, which also lists Cricfolks and GamblingTimes.com.
“If GamblingTimes.com and CricFolks.com are the model for how these companies treat media, then we’re looking at AI-generated slop (GamblingTimes.com) or extreme SEO with very few editorial staff (CricFolks.com),” Greschko wrote on X. “Either way, I worry that Deadspin doesn’t have a bright journalistic future ahead of it.”
“People had watched the Deadspin sale very closely,” Belfiore said, as the practice of selling real websites that became zombie farms was becoming known. “It can be non-obvious that the stories are AI-generated. You can get through a whole article that seems factually reasonable,” Belfiore said, “but it drives clicks. It makes money.” Also, paid content isn’t always labeled as such, Belfiore asserted, so it’s more difficult to know what’s an ad and what’s not.
Deadspin’s staff were let go when the website sold. Its stories are now filed by Field Services Media under a pre-existing contract, said Derek Harper, CEO of Field Services and a longtime sports writer. He viewed AI as the enemy for the publishing industry, he said in a brief conversation on Friday. “Deadspin’s stories used to headline the site. We provide content about games and events from more than 200 freelancers who write for us,” he said. When he asked the new owners what they planned, they’d said they were still figuring it out, Harper said.
In an email, Noremo stated the News-Press acquisition was unrelated to Deadspin’s purchase by Lineup Publishing: “The plan is, if we do buy the domain, to revive the site with its previous content and find a buyer. We do not plan to add any new content. The site will simply be restored, assuming the backup files of the website are complete, all the old articles will be preserved.”
Nonetheless, Belfiore is hoping a white knight will ride in before the sale on Tuesday, April 9, at the bankruptcy court: “Color me extremely skeptical,” he said of Noremo’s comment.
Grimshaw explained further: Not only would a live website show a buyer what they were buying, “every day the website remains offline, it loses domain authority, which measures a website’s credibility in the eyes of search engines like Google,” he said. “In other words, the longer it’s offline, its ability to rank highly in search engines decreases and the less valuable it becomes to a buyer.”
Neither of them saw the ultimate buyer deviating from the predatory business plan that has evolved out of failed legacy media sites. If Weyaweya prevails, however, the virtual doors to the News-Press content might open again for a time.