A disappearing news site and an AI cautionary tale
Friday, 14 November 2025
A Wellington start-up that boasted a dozen experienced journalists, and invited subscribers and advertisers, has scrubbed its website after scrutiny of its staff profiles.
Wellington Times, owned by Jack Campbell, purports to deliver “accurate, balanced, and engaging journalism that serves the public interest” while “providing comprehensive coverage across multiple beats” including politics, business and technology.
But despite advertising job vacancies and $20 monthly subscriptions, Campbell said it was all a terrible mistake.
“I used AI to help me build the website and it came up with all this stuff that was incorrect. I think I forgot to proof-read … I just didn’t notice the part down the bottom.“
Campbell, who says he’s a final year medical student at Otago University, launched his website about a month ago. Before it was updated on Friday, after questions from The Post, it claimed “50k monthly readers who trust our journalism and value quality content”.
Meanwhile, its editorial team was said to include nine editors, two reporters and one visual journalist; many of them award-winning.
Asked whether any of the staff ‒ including David Park, the Wellington Times’ political editor, described as “one of NZ’s most respected political journalists … who previously worked for The Dominion Post and RNZ” ‒ actually exist, Campbell initially wouldn’t comment.
He also wouldn’t comment on how many staff he has, nor how many people have subscribed to the site, but in a follow-up phone call the 25-year-old expressed his remorse.
“I am really sorry … I didn’t mean to deceive anyone.”
Dr Andrew Lensen, a senior lecturer in artificial intelligence at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington, says Campbell’s experience serves as a wider warning for anyone using AI tools.
“AI will produce anything you ask it to, but if you don’t have the patience or expertise to check the output, that’s when you’re in danger.
“And the danger is that you’re misleading people. We’re so used to deciding whether we trust something based on how legitimate it looks; this site had no misspellings or obvious errors so you can see how people could be misled by it.”
But the responsibility shouldn’t fall back on readers to verify basic elements like journalists’ identities, he said.
“You can Google the names, you can cross-reference secondary sources, you can check whether they’ve been published elsewhere — but that puts the work and obligation back on the reader. We’re all time-poor, and we need to have a certain level of faith in institutions.”
Another problem is when people turn to AI for things they can’t do themselves.
“If you don’t have the skills to produce something, you’re unlikely to have the skills to check it.
“We’ve been losing the battle against misinformation and disinformation for a while, and things like this add fuel to the fire.”
By midday Friday the Wellington News’ editorial team had been updated to list only Campbell as editor and publisher. By 3pm, the website was gone.