Churnalism.com is not going to “solve” the churnalism problem, nor is it supposed to. News outlets will continue to copy and paste press releases. Indeed listening to people in public relations, press releases are already “old school.” Much better to feed PR in via the news agencies than go straight to the news desks, and easier to strike long term commercial relationships with news outlets that enable constant cross promotion.
But churnalism.com will provide people with a tool to help distinguish between journalism and churnalism. And maybe it will make journalists think twice before putting their byline at the top of the next press release, and link to it instead. Who knows? It may even encourage more original journalism—which would be a very good thing.
"A piece of ‘churnalism’ is a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added."
That pretty much describes most AP reports on Iraq, Af-Pak, Iran, or Israel-Palestine.
#1 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 02:49 PM
How is it classified when one reporter treats another's work like a press release?
http://andrewottoson.com/2011/02/what-the-national-post-fixed/
#2 Posted by andrewo, CJR on Thu 3 Mar 2011 at 05:04 PM
Thanks Moore for this new terminology that helps define what the word "sensationalism" missed out by miles. The media scene in Kenya would take the highest accolades for perfecting this art of churnalism, especially from slanted political pejudices of individuals who pay heavily to sustain their perpetual presence on the front pages of the dailies as well as the electronic media.
#3 Posted by Laban G. Gitau, CJR on Fri 4 Mar 2011 at 04:51 AM
Churnalism.com, Turn It In for the scribbling generation.
But churnalism is not just copy and paste, it's churn for effect and to hell with understanding.
At root, churnalism is an abdication of responsibility and moral failing worn proudly by an entire profession.
#4 Posted by Eli Rabett, CJR on Tue 8 Mar 2011 at 10:00 AM
Please consider a little pushback. One small part of this piece concerns me - and, I suspect, would concern many who care about the quality of health care journalism.
The bothersome excerpt:
"Of course, not all churnalism is bad. There are plenty of press releases that are in the public interest. It would be odd if news outlets did not publish news about medical breakthroughs, about major government announcements, about exciting new consumer products."
I trust you did not mean to condone health care stories that are based solely on news releases and, as a result, fail to scrutinize claims, fail to get independent perspectives, fail to look at conflicts of interest in the people making the claims of "breakthroughs" in the news releases, etc. "Medical breakthrough" journalism raises blood pressure in many experienced health care journalism.
On our HealthNewsReview.org project, we evaluate stories based on 10 criteria - and reliance on a news release is one of them. And we blogged about a particularly bad example just this week.
We do think such churnalism is bad and we don't think that it's in the public interest.
Thanks for considering this perspective.
Gary Schwitzer
Publisher, HealthNewsReview.org
#5 Posted by Gary Schwitzer, CJR on Fri 11 Mar 2011 at 01:01 PM