In class we discussed the process known as ‘churnalism’ after exploring Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies. Davies maintains that:

Journalists who are no longer gathering news but are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false (p.59)

The research that supported the book was produced by Cardiff University and it shows that 54% of news articles have some form of PR generated copy in them.

Now the Media Standards Trust have come up with churnalism.com which provides a side-by-side comparison of texts to help us distinguish between original journalism and ‘churnalism’.

It’s a little bit like Turnitin, the software used to identify student ‘borrowings’ in their assessed coursework. You type or paste the text that you suspect is being churned by various journalists and the site trawls the UK press to see whether your suspicions are justified. Nice.