Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/is-it-journalism-or-just-a-repackaged-press-release-heres-a-tool-to-help-you-find-out/275206/

by hythloday • 13 years ago

183 63 13 years ago

theatlantic.com

Articulate• 13 years ago

As a former PR person I can tell you that this ap is AWESOME. the general public has no idea how much of their "news" is actually just corporate created "infomercials" I don't even mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist- but it is truly shocking when as an intern I would write press releases and then later that night hear my exact words said on the evening news. This is especially true of newspapers who are trying to create reams of content but with far fewer journalists. If this app works as well as they claim- this is a game changer.

thisishugo• 13 years ago

I never quite published a press release verbatim in all the news stories I have written[1], but sometimes the information density of a press release is so low as to make a rewrite look like a copy anyway.

[1]https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:trustedreviews.com+hu...

abraxasz• 13 years ago

I don't think there is a problem with press releases, as long as journalists acknowledge them for what they are: press releases. It's fine imho for a newspaper to reproduce a press releases verbatim, if it makes it clear to the reader that no post-processing has been done.

What is not ok is to trick the reader into believing that a piece of information has received adequate treatment, when it really hasn't. There's an implicit contract of trust between the newspaper and the reader, and if that app does what it advertises, it will make the contract harder to breach.

nemonoko• 13 years ago

I hate PR churn, and love the Churnalism app, but a lot more will be needed to stop the flood of low quality content. It would be great to have a browser-based tool to identify, tag, and filter bad journalism--kind of like a SPAM-filter for your brain.

taylorbuley• 13 years ago

I'll agree to "AWESOME" but won't give you "game changer."

The only way this will be a game changer is if we the audience hold media accountable for its content. I feel like if that was in the cards, there is plenty of readily available evidence to bolster claims of poor quality.

Moreover, is not the first app of this nature. Take the human-powered Newstrust.net (now run by Poyter I believe), which has crafted quantitive measures of "journalistic quality." It was another "awesome" model - but it's not widely used. No tool can hold news organizations accountable when its readers do not.

sehugg• 13 years ago

This would be pretty awesome with a browser plugin.

hythloday• 13 years ago

Here you go: http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/downloads/

notimetorelax2• 13 years ago

Does it analyse every page I visit? I would prefer if it was activated by a button press only when I need it.

obviouslygreen• 13 years ago

It may seem like a minor nitpick, but the main Churnalism site[1] touts the byline "Discover the journalism you can trust and what you should question." The purpose of this tool is definitely a step in the right direction, but just because a given piece probably isn't a recycled press release doesn't mean you should stop looking at it with a healthy dose of skepticism.

[1] http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/

DanBC• 13 years ago

Sometimes the press release is more accurate. There have been examples in the UK when something released by the Office for National Statistics[1] is looked at and interpreted by a journalist. Unfortunately statisticians get the numbers right and journalists don't, and so reporters make very dramatic statements that just aren't supported by the numbers.

[1] (http://www.statistics.gov.uk/hub/index.html)

jkldotio• 13 years ago

Which is why I include statistics.gov.uk in my UK section of http://jkl.io/ I think we can get around more than just churnalism if people have direct access to academic, state, NGO and partisan materials without journalistic intermediaries. It's niche, in that not everyone is going to read such a site, but important I think.

_9e9r2• 13 years ago

Though in our defense, there are also plenty of times when the numbers are wrong and journalists are right.

After performing a basic checksum, we contacted the UN to get a clarification on their firearm-homicides report discrepancy (their A + B should have been equal to C, but wasn't in some cases.) Their response was to basically manually correct column C without ever explaining why it was off. That shook our confidence in their collection and analysis methodology.

State department nonimmigrant visa statistics for the past decade has plenty of numbers for T-2, T-3, T-4, T-5 visas (about 1,500) but only zeroes for T-1. Problem? Description of "T-2" through 5 is "Spouse of T-1", "Child of T-1", "Parent of T-1" and "Unmarried siblings of T-1". So if these are dependents of the visa holders, what happened to T-1's? After pursuing this, we received no comment and hit a dead-end. Somewhat understandably, as T-1 description is a sensitive topic: "T-1: Severe human trafficking informants."

erdogan• 13 years ago

Agreed. Also, this tool seems to be more about raising questions about context rather than a litmus test for plagiarism. As the author wrote, "Although such quotations are not examples of churnalism per se, Devine says that that information will be helpful to readers too, showing them the context a quote appeared in, and giving them the chance to think about why a reporter selected a particular passage from all of the others."

mseebach4• 13 years ago

Aren't good PR people supposed to "sell" their story directly to a "journalist", without an intermediate publicly available press release? Will this tool find those?

Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR.

illuminate3• 13 years ago

"Aren't good PR people supposed to "sell" their story directly to a "journalist", without an intermediate publicly available press release?"

That would require that the "journalist" pay attention and not just directly look through their pile of releases for a "story". News departments are lazy and don't want to pay for real news, they want it spoon-fed.

mseebach4• 13 years ago

It's spoon-feeding I'm describing. It's just targeted, one-to-one spoon feeding instead of spray-and-pray press releases.

It is way easier for a journalist to go to lunch, accept flattery for his sharp style and leadership in his field, and then walk home and copy-paste the text handed to him, than sift through the same pile of press releases that every other journalist in the industry is also sifting through.

dspeyer• 13 years ago

No, it just requires the PR person to send the press release to the journalist without posting it publicly.

untog• 13 years ago

Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR.

Well, the Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit organisation, so it's certainly not quite the same as the article is describing.

mseebach4• 13 years ago

Parroting PR from non-profits is no better than parroting PR from corporations. In neither case is "journalism" going on.

It is of course possible that the reporter in question has followed this topic closely for years and therefore has sources that told her about this service - conveniently timed so she can lead the piece with "Today the Sunlight Foundation unveils Churnalism".

205guy• 13 years ago

Ditto on the irony. You'd think that with their stated mission, they would be more aware of the way they get publicity themselves. And if they choose to use the exact same methods they claim to fight, they would at least call themselves out and say "yeah, we're doing it too, but we're a non-profit/have cool software/helping others."

zapdrive• 13 years ago

Reminds me of the fake web browser and IQ study (which claimed IE users are dumb). Basically every media house just copy pasted the press release.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Quotient_(IQ)_and_...

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

Since then, has there been a real study into the relation between intelligence and browser choice? I suspect the hoax report largely was picked up by IT sites and mainstream press because the conclusion sounded plausible to them (IE users = not smrt).

ubersync• 13 years ago

Yea it was an exploit of a cognitive bias (confirmation bias, to be exact [1].)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

TeMPOraL2• 13 years ago

For reference, the term "PR Submarine" refers to pg's essay, "The Submarine" - http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

Obligatory reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh_Kx7UKndI

JonnieCache• 13 years ago

For an in depth investigation into this phenomenon, see Nick Davies' Flat Earth News:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distor...

runjake• 13 years ago

Great application. And as always, a healthy dose of skepticism is good.

The two questions I always ask myself when reading something or listening to someone is "Why are they telling me this? What is their motive by telling me this?". I ask these questions whenever I listen to anyone, from the salesperson, to a journalist, to a politician, to my wife and kids.

ignostic• 13 years ago

This is really awesome. It's definitely a step in the right direction, anyway.

If the tool really catches on, though, there's an easy loophole that spammers have been using to trick Google for the last ten years. You simply load the content into a "spinner" and have it generate synonyms. Articles for human consumption used to require manual editing, but the programs are getting better.

Spammers have been known to use a similar trick to re-use company "news" by sending journalists re-written releases as "exclusives."

This is why real journalists call, verify, and investigate. Publications like the NYT or WSJ are never fooled by the tricks above, though they may use some AP or PR copy to save time.

guelo2• 13 years ago

Before a journalist takes the time to load a press release into a "spinner" maybe they'll just go ahead and rewrite in their own words.

Create• 13 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_Ch...

mjn• 13 years ago

In addition to stuff lifted from press releases, it seems to also notice when articles borrow large chunks of verbatim text from Wikipedia.

stretchwithme• 13 years ago

kudos on the name.

danso• 13 years ago

A cool app, but a sad statement about the state of journalism that PR fluff is as easy to spot as seeing quotes come verbatim from previously published PR pieces. The more insidious PR can come from spoon-fed "exclusive" interviews and not be as easily detected by this process.

Even better would be something that produced a dossier of organizations and spokespeople...so that you can easily see the potential connections behind any quoted source (of course, there will be false positives) In news stories, someone's role as a shill can be papered over by calling them a: "industry expert" or "author" or "researcher/analyst"

fyi804• 13 years ago

Of course, the simple solution to that is that "Exclusive" is never in the reader's interest.

elorant• 13 years ago

And then publishers wonder why we've stopped buying newspapers years ago.

regis• 13 years ago

Isn't this a part of some sort of PR strategy for the Sunlight Foundation? It's sort of hard to take this article seriously when the article literally contains fragments from the application's about page. Isn't this what they're trying to 'protect us' from?

fyi804• 13 years ago

The Sunlight Foundation may be happy for you to know this is their PR. Not really their fault that the Rebecca Rosen is too lazy to write a proper article.

It ironically drives home the very point of their app, which perhaps was intentional by Rosen!

rthomas6• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, when I run the article through the tool it returns no hits.

doctorpangloss• 13 years ago

The Churnalism concept has been circulating in media/nonprofit think tanks for a couple years now.

Before a team worked on something similar at the Berkman Center in Cambridge, MA, we all discovered tools like iThenticate, which do the same job and more better.

More importantly, very little PR news was mislabeled as not PR. It was hypothesized that politicians read from PR directly into the Congressional record, but the instances were so exceedingly few and the audience so exceedingly small that there were no discoveries to announce.

Hence color me a little unsurprised that despite a great tool, Sunlight Foundation didn't actually find anything too controversial to announce with their tool.

fyi804• 13 years ago

If the PR was circulated privately to a high value, unique target (like Congress), would you expect an eternal analysis to find it?

eli2• 13 years ago

Depending on the release and the article, I'm not convinced that rewriting or lifting words from a press release is always a bad thing. Is it possible to write a story about the latest Consumer Price Index without it being substantially based on this press release http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf ? Is it possible to write about a newly announced iPhone without lifting data from Apple PR events or releases?

I would rather have an article that lifts a technical phrase from a press release over one that attempts to reframe or extrapolate from it in a way that is no longer factually correct.

fjh• 13 years ago

> Is it possible to write about a newly announced iPhone without lifting data from Apple PR events or releases?

No, but writing about the newly announced iPhone shouldn't really be called journalism.

eli2• 13 years ago

Why not? So is a press release never news?

fyi804• 13 years ago

This is a solved problem for journalists, and it is called "citing your sources". Either your source is anonymous and you give a good reason, or your source is cited.

When sources are not cited, we have PR or lies masquerading as journalism.

SilasX• 13 years ago

That'll be the day:

"According to a press release by [organization], '[entire rest of article]'."

_9e9r2• 13 years ago

Pardon my skepticism, but an automated tool that replaces vetting, critical thinking and analysis may not be as helpful as it leads to believe. I've punched in three stories that I specifically know came from a PR, and the tool wasn't able to spot anything amiss with it.

kenko• 13 years ago

Is it published on a technology or startup-focused site that isn't Ars Technica? It's a press release.

xadxad• 13 years ago

The Sunlight Foundation has been full of awesome ideas and tools. Its worth digging into their other projects

kderbe• 13 years ago

The Atlantic piece is light on details, but the Sunlight Foundation has a blog post describing the technology used for text pattern matching, titled "Churnalism US: the Nuts and Bolts" (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/23/churnalism-tec...). They've released the core matching code, called SuperFastMatch, as free software (https://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch).

Wonderdonkey• 13 years ago

Journalism isn't supposed to be fiction. The information comes from some place other than the journalist's mind, and often that information originates in a press release, though that absolutely should not be the end of a journalist's research.

Still I don't understand why journalists (including some of the ones I have hired as freelancers) are willing to regurgitate a press release and leave it at that. Some even plagiarize releases and put their bylines on the story, which is beyond shady. But beginning and ending with a press release is lazy. Sometimes more information just isn't available. Sometimes.

I cover technology. There is no technology that isn't announced in a press release. It's just the way the industry is. It's either a press release or leaked information that will appear in a press release later anyway.

But press releases, as someone here mentioned, are often lacking in details. They're also often just plain inaccurate. It is a very rare PR person who has any grasp of technology beyond Twitter and Microsoft Office.

Why do people write stories based exclusively on a press release instead of getting hold of the software or hardware, reading spec sheets, reading manuals or at least visiting the product information page online?

You write a story about a new projector. What ports does it have? Those aren't in the press release, but they're easily accessible. Throw ratio? Weight and dimensions? Lens options? Throw distance? All of those pieces of information are important to your readers and can easily be learned by looking outside the press release. So why skimp when your audience is counting on you?

Now, all of that said, I think the premise of this tool is a joke. Google works fine when I want to find out if my writers are plagiarizing verbatim, which I have caught some doing. But other than that, every single piece of journalism is based on information obtained from somewhere, whether it's a press release in your mailbox or a press conference in the White House, whether it's a whistle blower meeting you in secret or a piece of damning evidence you found in a dumpster. It all comes from somewhere.

zimpenfish• 13 years ago

Today I will mostly be: sketching out how to hook my URL catching bot to the Readability API for extracting article text and then to the Churnalism API for finding what press releases the BBC* have put lipstick on this time.

* other news-gathering organisations are available.

Intermernet• 13 years ago

I reckon all discovered examples should be posted by the browser plugin automatically to a central db where they can be analyzed. It won't take too long to build up a picture of which news outlets do this the most, then that data can be posted in a simple, updated list (with links to examples) for everyone to consume much as they would an email blacklist.

This could all be automated.

Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help

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