Update:
Following our reporting and the subsequent attention from the publishing community, Prism has now halted its operations and taken down its content.
A notice on the site says:
“We have currently completed our experiment. A big thank you to all who participated and gave their feedback. All activity is suspended for the foreseeable future.”
After digitalDrummer flagged what appeared to be systematic web scraping and repurposing of our content — first in a report here and then in a post shared with the publishing community on LinkedIn — our experience was subsequently examined in depth by media publications in Australia and the USA.
I received no direct response to my questions from Prism. However, a Prism director did respond to another journalist’s questions, stating:
“We don’t republish other publishers’ articles. We use licensed AI search tools together with publicly available facts and data to gather factual information about stories from multiple independent sources. Our system then synthesizes and transforms those facts into a completely new article, written from scratch, often with additional context, a different structure, and a different editorial angle based on what the system determines would be most useful for readers.
“Regarding digitalDrummer, our intention was to highlight your business/publication and introduce it to additional readers. More broadly, we see ourselves as helping people discover interesting businesses, publications, communities, and topics.”
If that accurately describes what was happening, I believe Prism should have been much more transparent about its use of digitalDrummer as a source. At the very least, we should have been told that our reporting was being used and given a link to the original stories.
And if you missed the saga, you can read the original story below.
While digitalDrummer normally reports on developments in the electronic percussion industry, this time the story is much closer to home.
It began with an email asking us to share a link to a story on another website which cited digitalDrummer. That request led us to investigate the article, based closely on an original digitalDrummer story, and we uncovered what appears to be a systematic pattern of AI-generated stories closely following digitalDrummer’s reporting.
Our review found that Prism News published corresponding articles for eight of the 10 stories digitalDrummer published between June 10 and July 15, 2026. Those articles included not only routine product announcements, but also original interviews, contributed articles and proprietary testing that originated with digitalDrummer.
Prism News is an AI-native publishing platform launched in May 2026 by New York-based Prism Media. At launch, the company said it operated more than 200 niche publications covering local communities, workplaces, hobbies and specialist interests. According to Prism, its automated publishing system continuously monitors online sources, generates articles using artificial intelligence and publishes them across these specialist titles with human oversight.
[The articles discussed in this report were published on prismnews.com, an AI-generated publishing platform operated under the Prism News brand.]
Since identifying the issue, we have examined dozens of Prism’s electronic percussion articles. Some acknowledge digitalDrummer as a source while combining our reporting with information from elsewhere. Others closely follow our original articles, changing the wording and headline while retaining the substance of our reporting. Several are based on material unique to digitalDrummer, including interviews we initiated, contributor articles commissioned specifically for our readers, and our independent testing.
The publication pattern is difficult to ignore. In most cases, Prism’s corresponding articles appeared within one or two days of the original digitalDrummer stories.
digitalDrummer stories reviewed | Corresponding Prism articles | Match rate |
10 | 8 | 80% |
As journalists, we recognise that media outlets frequently report on the same events. Established publications also build on each other’s reporting. However, accepted editorial practice is to undertake independent reporting wherever possible, clearly acknowledge when another organisation broke the story, or obtain permission where material is republished under licence. Checking with peers and publishing experts, we found no comparable editorial standard that endorses systematically rewriting another publisher’s original reporting with AI and presenting it as a new article under a made-up byline on a different masthead.
Our first contact with Prism concerned an article based on digitalDrummer’s latency research. That AI-generated version relied on outdated data and drew conclusions that did not appear in our original report. After we requested its removal and asked that digitalDrummer be excluded from Prism’s content gathering, the article was removed.
Subsequent investigation revealed that the latency article was not an isolated incident. We have since asked Prism to remove additional articles derived from digitalDrummer’s original reporting and to stop using our editorial content without permission.
In the interests of fairness, we invited Prism to explain its practices and answer three straightforward questions:
- Does Prism intentionally monitor digitalDrummer as a source for its electronic percussion coverage?
- How does it justify rewriting original reporting produced by other publishers and presenting the resulting articles as Prism content?
- What measures has it implemented since being asked to stop using digitalDrummer’s original material?
Prism failed to respond and if it does at any stage, we will publish its explanation.
For more than 16 years, digitalDrummer has invested in original reporting, independent product testing, exclusive interviews and specialist industry analysis. That work has been made freely available to readers around the world. It represents thousands of hours spent building relationships, testing products, attending industry events and documenting a sector that receives little attention from mainstream media.
Artificial intelligence is becoming an important tool for journalism, and we have embraced many AI technologies ourselves. But AI should support original journalism, not replace it by harvesting the work of specialist publishers who have invested years in developing expertise and trust.
We will continue doing what we have always done: reporting independently on the electronic percussion industry.
If you encounter articles elsewhere that appear to closely mirror digitalDrummer’s reporting, interviews or testing, we’d appreciate hearing from you. Independent specialist journalism depends not only on those who produce it, but also on a community that values and supports original work.
Postscript: Prism News has previously republished eight of our last 10 stories. We’ll let readers know if this one becomes number nine.