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

My, aren't we all cynical today?

There is nothing wrong with the concept of a press release, particularly when used as intended, as a starting point for a piece of journalism.

In the media we write many different kinds of stories. Some are the vast investigative pieces that put the world to rights and might one day win a Pulitzer prize, but others are simply humdrum announcements of new products or services. I'd have thought that a community of founders would appreciate the value engendered by outlets that gather eyeballs for particular sectors and spread the sort of bread and butter news that is press released day in day out by stakeholders in those sectors -- usually after having first removed the hype, dubious claims ("World's first!") misrepresentation ("A and B have partnered to..." when it means A has bought/licensed something from B) and fluff ("We are excited to...", "This development reaffirms our commitment to...") that the authors of the press releases have inevitably included.

The simple truth is that press releases were not designed for direct consumption by the public, and sites that reproduce them verbatim do nobody any favours. However, in many circumstances several outlets could legitimately run very similar stories based on the same press release, and deliver great value in doing so because they all reach different audiences. Using a press release as a source is not in every case a dirty little secret that needs to be exposed by clever software.

Addressing the point made in the parent post, it seems to me there is a bit of a disconnect in assuming that one can take a journalist to lunch, tell him how very clever he is, and then hand him copy-paste text. Wouldn't work on anyone I know...

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.

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.

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.

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.