Most news organizations (this applies to traditional papers as well as sites) are just local outlets that buy most of their articles wholesale from news wire services and maybe have someone to reword it a little or maybe not and then slap on a stock photo. They might have one local journalist, maybe even a photographer to write some articles based on local police reports, gov disclosures and whatever is pitched to them by PR from local companies and promoters.

Everyone forgets this but originally “fake news” referred to news websites that were basically fake versions of these local news sites made for towns that didn’t have a newspaper or towns that didn’t exist at all. These existed to either get clicks for ad revenue or to push completely fabricated stories for propaganda (almost always of the far right kind). Publishing on sites made to look like a small town newspaper website gave click bait articles a veneer of legitimacy relying on people to only read the headline on social media then click on the article to see if it looked vaguely legit before sharing it on. These sites would steal from other news sites or use earlier procedural generation (from before people would call this AI even though it’s nothing different or new) to create the filler fake content to prop up the illusion. Ofc then Trump with the aid of the entire media successfully managed to redefine the term fakenews to just mean any partisan news you don’t like.

Listicle sites were basically the same thing. Initially review sites who then squeezed employees leading to writing lower and lower effort reviews based on little to no testing eventually becoming little more than reworded versions of the official product descriptions. Top ten lists could be easily monetized with affiliate links and get high search ranking since consumers were often just wanting someone to tell them what to buy. Automating these lists has been simple for a long time and since there is no real reviews around any more the average person will have a hard time figuring out if they are bullshit. The only way to slap on a veneer of legitimacy to these lists without actually doing the work of testing and writing real reviews is to attach them to a media brand with some reputation which led to the purchasing of legacy magazines to turn them into zombie listicle sites and eventually even major sites like NYT etc started making their own product listicle divisions.

It’s very cool I love it.