The James Charles Google News Feed Has Added a Sports Article to Its Obituary Collection

The James Charles Google News feed, which has spent the better part of 2026 routing obituaries for unrelated men into the beauty YouTuber's creator coverage, added a new content category on August 24: a Mshale article about the junior season of a high school athlete named Derrick Moore. Two more obituaries also indexed this week, bringing the running total of non-creator content documented in the feed to a figure that has drawn its own low-grade commentary.

For the record, Mshale is a Minneapolis-based African-American community newspaper. Its coverage of Derrick Moore's junior season has no discernible connection to James Charles the YouTuber. Google News routed it anyway.

Observers who have been tracking the feed treat the Mshale entry as a category shift. The standing theory, circulated in comment threads and creator-adjacent forums, has been that Google News over-indexes obituary pages because they are structurally simple, keyword-dense documents. A sports feature from a regional community paper does not fit that model, which has prompted some to suggest the feed's matching logic is even looser than previously assumed.

A separate cohort online is less interested in the mechanism and more interested in the volume. The August 19 Legacy.com obituary for James Charles Gregory and a May 2026 entry for James Charles MacGregor out of Littleton, Colorado, surfaced this week alongside the Mshale piece. Some commenters have noted that MacGregor's May 2026 date places it squarely within a period already covered by prior documentation, meaning the feed was doing this continuously through months that had not yet been catalogued publicly.

A smaller thread of commentary has focused on the Mshale piece specifically as a kind of absurdist inflection point. The argument, paraphrased: obituaries at least share a structural reason to appear under a person's name. A junior-season sports recap for a different person with no name overlap to James Charles represents the feed operating on logic that has not been articulated by any platform statement or Google spokesperson, at least not publicly.

James Charles has not addressed the feed or its contents.

What happens next

Open questions include whether Google News will issue any guidance on how creator feeds are assembled, whether the Mshale indexing represents a one-time anomaly or the start of a broader content-type pattern, and whether the documented archive of non-creator content in this feed will prompt any formal response from James Charles's team or from YouTube.