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Friday 18 March 2011

No More Churnalism


NO MORE CHURNALISM



While searching a topic for my next blog , I came across a very interesting website called Churnalism .com which is an independent, non profit website built by Media Standards Trust. Which gives people the opportunity to distinguish original journalism from churnalism.


Churnalism.com invites people to paste press releases on the site and compares the copy with more then 3 million articles published by national newspapers websites, the BBC, or sky news since 2008.
This website compresses all articles which are published by national newspapers, the BBC and sky news online into a series of numbers based on 15 character strings and then store them in fast access database. So when someone pastes the text in the box and clicks compare, the churn engine compresses the text entered and then searches for similar compressions. If the engine finds something similar to the pasted materiel like more then 20% similarity then it suggests the article to be churn.

The website also shows you the percentage of the copy, cut and pasted into the article from press release. You also get to see the press release alongside the article highlighting the bits that have been copied.



I feel somehow this website works like university plagiarism software which can catch your copy pasted parts and sources. And as a Public relations student I feel I won’t mind if I get to see my press release as a article in newspaper till the time I am being documented as the source.

Image and information source

3 comments:

  1. Yes, i have to say that I don't mind as well.PR practitioners are closely working with journalists and both them have a common goal; to provide people the right information. I don't get why it is bad that journalists work with PR practitioners. They have a symbiotic relationship and both of them are cooperating in order to produce the best results.

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  2. I disagree as journalists are said too be the 3rd state. Their job it to investigate the public and social world, instead they seem to just take PR practitioners at there word, who obviously have a want to positively represent their cleints or employee. This means that Journalist do not bother to look at issues, events from all angles means that may miss massive issues.

    However, this website is a great tool of evaluation in PR as it can quickly tell practitioner how sucessful their press release have been.

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  3. It is an open secret that journalists "copy" and "paste" news releases. It Is nothing wrong with that. But just like eva said, this website is able measure how many news releases that have been sent out to mass media and therefore evaluate the result.

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