The city of Newark, N.J. will pay a weekly paper $100,000 US to print some good news about the many positive things happening in that burgh.

Some excerpts from the Oct. 25 NYT story:

This month, the city hired Legacy Media Group, the parent company of Visions Metro Weekly, a free tabloid with circulation of 25,000, to publicize "positive aspects of the city." ...

Unlike advertisements that many cities take out in local papers or "advertorial" articles paid for by sponsors but set in different type or labeled to distinguish them from news reports, the City Hall-generated articles in Visions Metro Weekly look like any other articles in the paper.

John V. Pavlik, the chairman of the journalism department at Rutgers University, called it "fake news." ...

Howard J. Scott, one of the partners at Legacy Media Group and the editor of Visions Metro Weekly, brushed aside such criticism and defended his paper as the only one in Newark to specialize in positive news, which he defined as inspirational or helpful to readers.

"My vision is to promote the positive aspects of the communities we cover," he said. The deal with the city, he said, "has nothing to do with being led by the city of Newark or having them tell us what to put in our news columns."