This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

I hadn't done a pitch call out in about a year, I guess,

so I hadn't really been paying attention to what that world was like.

But this time I got way more pitches than ever very quickly from all over the place.

It was very different than the year before.

Nicholas Hume Brown is the editor of The Local, which is an independent online magazine that

covers social issues in Toronto.

Last September, they put out an open call for freelance journalists to pitch stories

for their upcoming issue.

We were looking to assign stories about health care and money.

There's been some creeping privatization in Ontario where we live.

So we put out a call for pitches.

I posted something on Blue Sky Sky just asking freelancers,

give me a suggestion. Nick got a lot of pitches, but among those, there was one in particular that

stood out. This was a writer who called herself Victoria Goldie. She said in the email that she'd

written for a bunch of these Canadian publications that do similar work to what we do. It was a well-written pitch, I thought. And when I did a quick Google of her, she had bylines and a bunch of, you know, reputable publications, The Guardian, New York Magazine, places like that. You know, when you see someone as written for all these other publications, my first instinct was like, that seems legit. You know, these other publications are good publications. I'm not going to be too suspicious.

Why would you be?

Yeah.

But Victoria Goldie turned out not to be who she said she was.

And this sent Nick down a really weird rabbit hole investigation.

You've heard of fake news?

...