I think what we see here is either one or both of the following.
AP packages, often with paid sponsorship. Newspapers have been going broke for years. Their biggest money maker used to be classifieds. With fewer ad buys, they have resorted to packages which appear as news articles but are actually paid advertisements. Perhaps in this case an anti-gun lobby group paid for an AP story which was picked up by several locals, or directly paid for publication in the locals. To make the story relevant for their readers, the city name was simply changed to match.
Another way to cut costs and improve profitability is by using bots to write more and more articles. This has a downside of creating repetitive articles like this because they often use searches of other news to generate the articles. As more papers have switched to this style, fewer and fewer original authors means we get garbage like this.
I think what we see here is either one or both of the following.
AP packages, often with paid sponsorship. Newspapers have been going broke for years. Their biggest money maker used to be classifieds. With fewer ad buys, they have resorted to packages which appear as news articles but are actually paid advertisements. Perhaps in this case an anti-gun lobby group paid for an AP story which was picked up by several locals, or directly paid for publication in the locals. To make the story relevant for their readers, the city name was simply changed to match.
Another way to cut costs and improve profitability is by using bots to write more and more articles. This has a downside of creating repetitive articles like this because they often use searches of other news to generate the articles. As more papers have switched to this style, fewer and fewer original authors means we get garbage like this.
"local" papers all fed stories from the top down, as propaganda to spread.
local paper owned by Gannett aka usa today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gannett
Gannett owned by
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Group