The study explores the journalistic role perceptions and role performance of local interloper media outlets and practitioners in Finland. The paper approaches the roles in the context of the blurred boundaries among journalism, strategic and commercial communication and civic information, where journalistic forms and methods are applied by non-traditional news providers, including municipality/city-funded media and online commercial outlets. The study focuses on media outlets that produce news-like content but do not officially adhere to the ethical guidelines set out for Finnish journalists. Role performance is analysed using a data set of 169 online news articles published by interloper media outlets, and role perceptions are analysed via nine semi-structured interviews with the representatives of these outlets. The civic and service roles were the most commonly performed by the sampled media outlets, but the lack of a watchdog role shows that the civic role is performed without appropriate critical inquiry into local issues. The analysis also indicates that commercial online media outlets tend to adopt more civic and watchdog roles in their content. Municipality/city-funded media outlets, on the other hand, adopt the infotainment, interventionist and loyal-facilitator roles more often, where the latter role is highly present in the interviews with municipality/city-funded media practitioners, but not in their content. Conversely, the infotainment role is present in the content but not in the interviews. The study shows that interlopers do not adopt or adopt only parts of the roles that aim towards critical journalism and that many practitioners perceive the loyal-facilitator role as the most important one.