Welcome to The Explanation from the BBC World Service.
I'm Ros Atkins and this is The Media Show.
We're here to explain the trends behind the fast-changing media landscape.
This week on The Media Show,
how major publications have been caught out by pitches from a mysterious AI-using freelancer,
the YouTubers who've won live broadcast rights for German football,
and the secrets behind natural history television.
We're talking to the director, who's been filming baby animals across six continents.
A number of online news outlets have withdrawn articles by what they thought was a freelance journalist called Margot Blanchard.
But now it seems the stories may have been written by AI.
Press Gazette broke the story.
They'd been tipped off by Jacob Ferreira.
editor of Dispatch.
The story started a few weeks ago when I received a peculiar pitch in my inbox from a freelance writer called Margot Blanchard,
which, by all accounts, it was a perfect pitch for Dispatch.
It was about a decommissioned mining town in Colorado called Gravemont,
where Blanchard claimed thousands of dead bodies would be brought into the town by train,
where...
where emergency workers and police officers could practice training on them in case of a disaster.
It was a crazy story.