I've never heard of them, so can't say if they're junk. But they're certainly gullible.

It's a small media company whose primary business is operating a handful of local newspapers and TV stations. They have no privileged access to mobile operating systems. If they really had implemented this scheme in actual apps (rather than just write it into a pitch deck), those apps would need to be asking for microphone permissions.

Note how there never was any follow-up showing that this really was happening. The story was only ever about that pitch deck. Compare that to e.g. the currently ongoing story about the dodgy things done by the Honey browser extension.