Medill sophomore wins 2026 Howell Essay Contest

Valentina Valcarce’s winning essay highlights how machine generated content fooled editors

EVANSTON, ILL. -- Valentina Valcarce (BSJ28) was named the 2026 winner of the Walter S. and Syrena M. Howell Essay Competition at Medill. The annual contest challenges students to discuss “truth gone awry” in the context of news gathering and dissemination. Valcarce will be awarded $4,000.

Valcarce’s essay, “Truth Gone Awry: How a Ghost Writer Exposed the Hollow Core of Modern Journalism,” discusses the case of Margaux Blanchard, a “journalist” who wrote for many publications but “was almost certainly a machine-generated construct – a fictional byline used to place invented articles in real publications.”

As Valcarce notes in her essay, “Blanchard was caught, but only barely. Catching her required a suspicious editor at a small outlet, a payments administrator who noticed an irregular reimbursement request, and a Press Gazette investigation that none of the affected publications had initiated themselves. Not one internal system raised the alarm. The screeners failed. The editorial process, where it existed, failed. What worked, in the end, was a spreadsheet that could not process a PayPal address.”

“I was instantly drawn to write about artificial intelligence and its growing influence in journalism, not only because of my aspirations as a Medill student but also as a broader Wildcat,” said Valcarce. “In every class I have taken at Northwestern, there is now a generative AI policy in the syllabus. At Medill, we are constantly pushed to anchor every story in timeliness by asking, ‘Why now?’ and it became clear to me that AI, given its rapid and pervasive impact, was impossible to ignore.

“That urgency led me to the Margaux Blanchard case, which felt both surreal and deeply revealing. I have had countless conversations with professors and peers about where journalists fit in an AI-driven future, and writing this essay only clarified my belief: We are not going anywhere. AI can generate content, but it can’t replace legitimate reporting, curiosity, or fact-checking. Being human is still a journalist’s greatest superpower,” said Valcarce.

The contest was judged by a panel of faculty members from the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. “Valentina Valcarce’s essay was smartly written, analytically rigorous, and chock full of sobering examples from around the world,” said one judge. “Her essay also came with a dose of practical, common-sense advice on how to stop the creep of AI slop masquerading as real news. It isn’t running stories through an AI content detector.”

Said another judge, “Valentina Valcarce excoriates Wired, Business Insider and other major publications for running fabricated stories by a nonexistent author. With superb writing, she warns crash-strapped news outlets about the risks to their credibility of failing in their duty to verify the writers they hire and the stories they publish.”

“Valentina Valcarce chose a ‘truth gone awry’ example that illustrates why machines can’t replace human reporters or editors. In her call to action, she says this case illustrates ‘what happens when an industry dismantles its own verification infrastructure.’ She also notes that what works is phoning sources, checking names and requiring editors to read all stories.”