An excellent piece by Michael Cross in this edition of NUJ in house magazine “The Journalist” (Journalists under the spotlight) mirrored several conversations I have had recently about the onward march of “churnalism”.This is a term coined by Nick Davies of the Guardian and it means the practice in media organisations of recycling press releases rather than doing original reporting.
With cutbacks in the print sector in Britain continuing to diminish the quality of the product then those journalists left are increasingly vulnerable to being turned into churnalists. In churning out copy almost wholly based on press releases the journalist becomes a mere secretary of the PR professional.
This is not in anyone’s interest it devalues and deskills good decent journalists and it diminishes the product. Subsequently churnalism must be exposed where it appears.
I would therefore commend the following website set up by the Media Standards Trust.
The site’s “churn engine” claims that it can match a segment of text from a press release to articles published across the web by national newspapers in the UK.
So I’m crowd sourcing this one. My tekkie guy informs me that the regular visitors to this site continue to grow exponentially.
I will be interested to learn what examples of churnalism that you all can find in your favourite newspapers.
