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 refers to the tendency 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. This term has been made popular by Nick Davies, the author of Flat Earth News
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.
"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.
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.
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