Slime Times

SLIME TIMES… Squid spends a lot of time oozing around the internet to read the news. So Squid was surprised to discover a local site Squid hadn’t previously read, Monterey Times, with stories about gas prices, enrollment data in local K-12 schools, sports scores and an extensive list of homes for sale in Kern County. Wait, what?

Squid took a closer look and the site is part of the nonprofit Metric Media, which was “established to fill the void in community news after years of decline in local reporting by legacy media. This site is one of hundreds nationwide to inform citizens about news in their local communities.” Maybe they got their wires crossed between Monterey and Kern counties.

Or maybe a bunch of wires got crossed – all or most of the site appears to be AI-generated, with rehashed press releases and only one byline, which is “Monterey Times.” The site has been registered since 2019; the Weekly reported on so-called “pink slime” journalism masquerading as real journalism on this series of hundreds of Metric Media sites back in 2020. That’s a lot of slime, but real human readers just started reaching out to ask Squid what was up.

So Squid’s colleague reached out to ask if there are human (or cephalopod) reporters at Monterey Times or just AI, but Squid heard back from neither human nor robot.

EXCUSE ME… Squid may never give up on Squid’s quest for a much-deserved Seaside Star, but Squid doesn’t care much about fame – Squid prefers the company of Sammy the sea star to most celebrities.

That being said, Squid did ooze over to Moss Landing on June 4 for a potential Erin Brockovich sighting, because even though there’s a movie and title character of that name, Squid had never seen the actual person. And because when a law firm’s publicity team flooded inboxes with a promised in-person appearance from Brockovich at a press conference, Squid figured other media would flock there too, so Squid wanted to see the show. Well, it turns out Squid still doesn’t know what the real Brockovich looks like, as Knut Johnson, senior counsel for law firm Singleton Schreiber – which is representing hundreds of local residents in their lawsuits against Vistra and PG&E for damages relating to the Jan. 16 Vistra fire – announced that Brockovich had “car trouble” and could not make it. So Johnson – who’d flown up from San Diego with other Singleton Schreiber employees for the event – used the opportunity to call out PG&E for a lack of transparency in its attempt to bring its adjacent Elkhorn battery facility back online. (The utility company shut it back down just after turning it on earlier in June.)

Squid left after just a few minutes – the celebrity no-show was the news, and everything else was just wasted energy.