On a summer’s day last year, somewhere near Strangeways prison, Zoë Bread, an online content creator and citizen journalist, was waiting for one of her most valuable sources to arrive. The source was a wealthy commercial property agent — Bread had been tapping him for rumours from Manchester’s property grapevine — and in anticipation of his arrival, she’d plugged all the details she could find about him into ChatGPT and asked it to predict what sort of car he might arrive in.
The chatbot said either a blue or a grey Porsche. When the two-door blue Porsche arrived, Bread got in, and gave directions to the nearest trampoline park.
Bread is not a conventional journalist, or a conventional citizen journalist, or perhaps even a conventional citizen. She carries out all her endeavours anonymously, her face obscured by a piece of bread printed with a smiley face. She delivers her investigations in short TikTok videos over a span of many days. And, since last April, she has come to utterly bedevil Manchester City Council, in a saga that started with her getting a parking ticket, and has brought her to investigate the financing of the city’s biggest developments. People hail her as the only journalist Manchester has left.
But who is she?
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