It was a sunny june afternoon in Washington, DC, and even though Tara McGowan professes to hate this city, she was having fun.
A political operative turned publisher, she sat in a conference room in a WeWork office downtown, her fingertips loudly drumming away on the bright orange table. The energetic 36-year-old is the CEO of a company called Good Information, where she oversees a mini-empire of progressive local news sites across the United States.
Beaming in on a big video screen was Pat Rynard, himself a Democratic operative turned journalist and founder of a small political website called Iowa Starting Line, which The New York Times once declared the It’ read for political insiders.” McGowan had bought the site from him in 2021, making it the eighth in her growing collection of two to six-person newsrooms stretching from Arizona to North Carolina.
McGowan believes these outlets are the antidote to bad information—the hyperbole and lies that proliferate in Americans’ social media feeds and promote ideas mostly from the ideological right. Through the calculated injection of news stories into these feeds, McGowan thinks she can claw a crumbling republic back from the brink and—this is the important part—get more people to vote. She’s confident these new recruits to the democratic process will lean decidedly left.
Rynard walked her through an experiment in using Facebook's powerful ad-targeting tools. Iowa's primary elections were taking place the next day, and he wanted to know whether a handful of Iowa Starting Line's stories could shape the results. Primaries are the sort of political contest that both keep democracy afloat and tend to be roundly ignored.
"Remind me when the actual boosting of the coverage started?" asked McGowan, sipping from a giant pink water bottle.
This story is from the November 2022 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the November 2022 edition of WIRED.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
RUSSIAN, GO HOME
WHEN MY COUNTRY WENT TO WAR, I FACED A CHOICE: Flee to a world where the truth might kill me - or seek peace in censored oblivion.
The Fateful Eight
THE STORY BEHIND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL PAPER IN RECENT HISTORY.
Can the Internet's Greatest Authenticity Machine Survive Wall Street?
When thousands of subreddits went dark in protest last summer, it exposed the tension at the core of Reddit - on the eve of the company's IPO. Now that synthetic media is flooding the internet, does the web's most reliably human forum represent a gold mine for investors, or an old-fashioned dumpster fire?
The Unnerving Presence of Javier Bardem
He's known for playing fanatics and murderous psychopaths. In real life, he loves his wife (and Brad Pitt) and cries during E.T.
HAPPY HAUNTING
IN A CHARMING game called This Discord Has Ghosts in It, up to 15 participants at a time gather in a Discord server that has been reimagined as a haunted house. (Of course.) Inside lies a maze of (chat) rooms where each player takes the role of either an eponymous spirit or a paranormal investigator.
THE MYTH OF METAL
How I became a Python programmer - and learned to love our abstract world.
SO YOU WANT TO REWIRE BRAINS
There's a lot to like about brain-computer interfaces, those sci-fi-sounding devices that jack into your skull and turn neural signals into software commands. Experimental BCIS help paralyzed people communicate, use the internet, and move prosthetic limbs.
FOR GIANT LIZARDS, PLEASE HOLD
The sounds of Slack have a secret history.
WOMEN AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD
They go to Antarctica with dreams of studying the unknown. What they discover there is the stuff of nightmares.
THE NERD-KING VIBES OF JENSEN HUANG
The Nvidia CEO turned a graphics-card company into a trillion-dollar AI behemoth. Now he wants to transform the rest of the world-health care, robotics, autonomous driving, the works.