  In today's news ecosystem, news sources emerge frequently and can vary widely
in intent. This intent can range from benign to malicious, with many tactics
being used to achieve their goals. One lesser studied tactic is content
republishing, which can be used to make specific stories seem more important,
create uncertainty around an event, or create a perception of credibility for
unreliable news sources. In this paper, we take a first step in understanding
this tactic by exploring verbatim content copying across 92 news producers of
various characteristics. We find that content copying occurs more frequently
between like-audience sources (eg. alternative news, mainstream news, etc.),
but there consistently exists sparse connections between these communities. We
also find that despite articles being verbatim, the headlines are often
changed. Specifically, we find that mainstream sources change more structural
features, while alternative sources change many more content features, often
changing the emotional tone and bias of the titles. We conclude that content
republishing networks can help identify and label the intent of brand-new news
sources using the tight-knit community they belong to. In addition, it is
possible to use the network to find important content producers in each
community, producers that are used to amplify messages of other sources, and
producers that distort the messages of other sources.
