The Media Standards Trust has launched a website aimed at highlighting instances of 'churnalism' - a phrase made popular Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, which refers to the tendancy among some journalists to cut and paste content from press releases with minimal 'topping and tailing' and little effort to seek independent comment or challenge claims therein.
Called, appropriately enough, Churnalism.com the website will enable visitors to check press releases against more than three million news articles, from national newspapers and the websites of major broadcasters.
Of course, it should be stressed at this point that information has pretty much been taken verbatim from the Media Standards Trust press release. Irony is alive and well.
Visitors to the non-profit website will also apparently be able to see the percentage of any press release cut and pasted into news articles as well as tagging examples of 'churn' for others to see, thus creating a database of 'churnalism', and sharing them via Twitter and Facebook.
Martin Moore, director of the Media Standards Trust said (in a press release emailed to The Media Blog, just to be transparent about just how little thought, research and effort went into this post):
"News organisations can now be much more transparent about the sources of their articles, but most of them still aren't. Hiding the connection between PR and news is not in the interests of the public.
"Hopefully churnalism.com will nudge them to be more open about their use of PR material."
"Maybe churnalism.com will also encourage more original journalism. Exposing unoriginal churn may help slow the steep decline in the amount of original reporting that we've seen in the last few years."
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