My take on THAT viral AI Journalism article.
Plus: Christmas carols, mongooses, Ringo Starr.
Two weeks to go! My year-end planning workshop is on Friday, December 5th. Join us at 10:00 AM (EST) for two hours of mapping out a joyful and sustainable year of writing.
The next Pitching Power Hour co-working session is on Wednesday, December 3rd at 11:00 AM (EST). It’s extra special because 1.) It’s open to EVERYONE and 2.) It has a soundtrack! We’ll enjoy 1940’s Christmas carols while we work. Zoom link and details coming next week.
If you’re in any Canadian journalism group, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the story I’m about to talk about. Heck, if you’re in international groups, there’s a good chance you’ve seen it as well.
The Local, a Toronto-based publication, published Investigating a Possible Scammer in Journalism’s AI Era by Nicholas Hune-Brown. As they describe it:
A suspicious pitch from a freelancer led editor Nicholas Hune-Brown to dig into their past work. By the end, four publications, including The Guardian and Dwell, had removed articles from their sites.
If you haven’t read it yet, this is your signal to abandon me for a few minutes and drink in Hune-Brown’s piece.
Everyone caught up? Good!
I had the strangest, most unexpected feeling while I was reading this piece. Hope. I was feeling hopeful. It’s clear that people really, REALLY care about journalism. Hune-Brown contacted many people for the piece, including top editors at fancy-pants publications and sources at even fancier companies and organizations. In other words, he was reaching out to some very busy folks. And they all responded to help him unravel this situation. They cared! While this is a piece about someone who did something wrong, I was very moved by how many people were doing something right.
I also felt a strange sense of relief. It’s okay if an editor googles me and finds some of my less impressive stories or some very goofy photos of myself and my pets. That less-than-impressive material proves that I’m beautifully real. A writer with nothing but impeccable bylines isn’t necessarily what editors want. They want a sincere person who is going to put in the hard work. There’s a real scarcity mentality weighing on freelancers, one that says there’s not nearly enough good-paying work and that if you make even the tiniest of errors, if you are anything less than 100% impressive, 100% of the time, your editor is going to feed your carcass to a pit of ravenous mongooses and never work with you again.
I once sent an editor a draft, but it turned out to be the wrong one. I sent her my draft of a recipe I was working on instead of the travel article that was due. I was mortified! Like, beyond ashamed. And my editor laughed it off, saying it looked like the other piece was going to be a cool story. Looking back, that incident, which I remember in vivid, red-cheeked shame several years later, probably didn’t even make the top ten list of her day’s problems. Time to take that scarcity fed fear and shake it off. (However, I can’t shake my mistake-fear that easily. I had to look up the plural of mongoose, and yes, it IS mongooses, but mongeese is acceptable, and I really wanted to use that because it is 1000% cuter, but I went with science on this one.)
Finally, I felt a sense of ease. I’ve often thought that, to successfully pitch a story, I’d better have some strong sources lined up. No, not strong sources. Amazing sources. Why speak to a local music teacher when you track down Taylor Swift and Paul McCartney? Actually, I’d go with Ringo, but you get the point. Hune-Brown’s work reminded me that ordinary people are lovely sources and that it’s a storyteller’s job to show everyone why there is no such thing as an “ordinary” person. So if you have a connection to a Nobel-winning chemist, use it. However, no editor is realistically expecting that, and chances are they will be mighty happy that your local garden club has agreed to be interviewed on the value of compost.
(I would LOVE to interview Ringo Starr, and I wouldn’t ask him a single music question. I would ask him all about knitting. He learned to knit while spending long periods of his childhood in hospital. Tell me you wouldn’t read the heck out of a piece about Ringo Starr, knitting prodigy).
(I regret that neither I nor any other journalist ever interviewed the late Rolling Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts about how he apparently sketched every hotel room he ever stayed in. Do all drummers have fascinating artistic side stories?)
There is, however, one unhappy feeling that’s been stuck in my stomach since I first read the piece (and it’s not the result of the piece at all). Hune-Brown concludes the story with a note of compassion, quoting one of “Victoria’s” earlier pieces where she writes about the all-too-familiar struggle to be perfect and productive. I’m worried that not everyone is being so compassionate. Writers, like everyone else, I suppose, love a bit of gossip now and then. I bet this story is being passed around, but not necessarily read through. ‘Some girl tried to swindle The Local!’ ‘They’re onto her at The Guardian and Dwell!’ Perhaps Victoria is a scammer and swindler. Maybe she is laughing all the way to the bank, reinventing a new identity for herself right now. Or maybe she is one of many freelancers who felt the pressure, the perfectionism, the scarcity mentality, and took it to heart, finding herself in a web when all she hoped to do was build a safety net. Maybe that Victoria is feeling very lonely right now. So in the one-in-a-million chance that she one day reads this, I hope she knows that her story, her real story, still matters.
Loved your take on this as I too felt a sense of hope in reading this article—real journalism still matters. Alongside AI, we freelancers may still survive. Let's hope Ms Goldiee finds her way back too.