Gemma Tutton is a Duke University student. She is also a pole vaulter who has represented Great Britain at international competitions. Following a first-place finish at a university meet, The Duke Chronicle named Tutton “Blue Devil of the Week” in an article published on Jan. 31 at 2:57 p.m.
Seventeen minutes later, the Durham News Today podcast dropped a new episode on Spotify called “Gemma Tutton’s Triumphant Return to Pole Vaulting.” The show has no affiliation with the student newspaper. But its episode does appear to be built entirely from the Chronicle's story. The AI-generated podcast host repeats almost all of the facts in the campus daily often in the same order, and even copied several phrases:
Indicator found almost 30 more Durham News Today episodes that also appeared to borrow heavily from the Duke Chronicle, often on niche topics like the deliberations of the student government. Each episode typically published about 15 minutes after the student newspaper’s articles went online.
Duke journalism professor Bill Adair came across the show while searching for a podcast by Tutton, a student in his AI journalism class. “At first I thought, ‘Wow! There’s a podcast dedicated to news from my town!’” he told me. “I figured it was the product of a local entrepreneur. But then when I listened and saw the odd mix of stories, it was clear it was done by AI.”
And it extends far beyond Durham, N.C.
Durham News Today is one of at least 433 shows by The Daily News Now! (DNN), a podcast network that claims to reach “millions of listeners monthly across 150+ U.S. cities and 50+ global cities, with dozens of charting shows across Sports, News, Tech, and Entertainment.”
Indicator couldn’t verify the claims about DNN’s audience. But I found that DNN has published more than 350,000 episodes since January 23. That's roughly 11,000 episodes a day — or more than a year of content if you played it back-to-back.
On LinkedIn, DNN’s creator Corey Cambridge describes DNN as “an audio first global-local news network built for the way people actually consume news today,” adding that “we deliver fast, reliable local updates through short-form podcasts and live audio—making it easy to stay informed without the noise.”
Indicator analyzed more than 100 episodes across seven DNN shows and found that they often reused the same facts, structure and even phrases as articles from media outlets such as local affiliates of Fox and NBC News, TechCrunch, Toronto Star, The Verge and WRAL. The episodes often published mere minutes after what seemed to be their source material.
Adair said DNN is “taking news and feature stories published by hard-working journalists and repackaging it for what appears to be a money-making enterprise. I consider that plagiarism. It definitely would violate any reasonable company’s ethics policy.”
Cambridge said his systems are designed to “generate short audio summaries from publicly available reporting.” He said that the examples I found were errors and represent a tiny fraction of DNN’s output, adding that “we don’t target or mirror any single publication, and we don’t position DNN as an original newsroom.”
Indicator’s findings suggest news media outlets are ever more vulnerable to the systematized scraping of their articles for the generation of derivative content.
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