Transcript
A (0:01)
From KCRW and Placement Theory, this is Question Everything. I'm Brian Reed. Today on our show, an editor confronts a writer who he suspects of trickery.
B (0:10)
I saw that you had a couple of pieces in Popsugar that I was trying to read, but I think they'd been removed. Do you have any idea what was going on there?
C (0:17)
The editor who published the story and left the publication.
A (0:22)
Stick around. A little while back, I got connected with a journalist who'd found himself embroiled in a bit of a mystery. Nicholas Hune Brown is an editor at an online magazine based in Toronto called the Local. Does lots of local coverage to Toronto. Not long before we were put in touch, Nick had put out a call for pitches from freelancers, which is something he loved to do as an editor. Welcome new writers into the fold, give them a platform. And Nick got what he was looking for. A pitch came in from a journalist in Toronto that sounded great at first, but then as he looked deeper at it and the journalists behind it, Nick began to suspect that this writer might not be who she seemed. As he told us when we got put in touch, he soon became obsessed with this writer and finding out everything he could about her. Here's Nick.
B (1:18)
Looking for new writers is an important part of my job. I want to bring in new people with new points of view, young writers or people from communities who aren't always represented in the media. That's not out of any vague, high minded idea about diversity. It's good for the magazine. It's how we find stories that others don't. It helped us win awards for our tiny newsroom, punching way above our weight. A few months ago, in September, we put a call out for stories about healthcare privatization, which has become a fraught topic in Canada. And I got a pitch from a new writer that seemed promising. She had a memorable name, Victoria Goldie, spelled G O L D I E E. Victoria's pitch was about the rise of what she called membership medicine. Healthcare is free here, but new companies were popping up, charging monthly subscription fees and promising to help you skip the line. Victoria was going to talk to the people using those services and talked to the people angry about being pushed to the back of the line. It was a story about a trend, she said, that could transform Canada's universal healthcare system into something resembling Netflix or Amazon Prime. I liked it. The Netflix comparison was fun. The analysis seemed sound and the rest of the writing was sharp. She said she'd written for the Globe and Mail, the Walrus and Maisonneuve, Canadian outlets that publish the same kind of feature writing we do. Most impressively. She'd already done a lot of the reporting. Victoria said she'd interviewed a consultant in Vancouver and a 58 year old construction worker in Hamilton, Ontario. She had a great quote from a prominent Toronto physician, Danielle Martin, who said, membership medicine is a creeping form of privatization. When I googled Victoria, the author headshot that came up was of a youthful black woman. According to her bio, she was a writer with a keen focus on sharing the untold stories of underrepresented communities in the media. And I saw that she had bylines at across a whole range of publications. Victoria had written short pieces in the Cut and the Guardian. There were longer, more serious features in publications like the nonprofit Outrider and the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland. The overall impression from her publication history was ambitious. Young freelancer on the rise. I was sold. I brought her pitch to the next editorial story meeting. We'd received similar pitches before, but no one had done all the legwork Victoria had. Plus, like I said, we're always eager to try out new people. We decided to assign the story. When I got home from the office that evening, I took a final look at her pitch. But reading it this time, an eerie feeling came over me. The slick pitch suddenly seemed a little too slick. Minor questions I may have brushed aside earlier, eager to just get the story assigned now gnawed at me. First of all, lots of Victoria's bylines were in New York magazines and British newspapers. Was she actually in Toronto? Earlier, I'd been impressed that she'd done so much reporting already, even interviewing local construction workers. But as I thought more about it, that jumped out as a red flag. I've freelanced a lot in the past, and I know from experience that doing so many interviews before officially getting hired is a big gambler.