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

theatlantic.com

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

#41

Post by fyi80 »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #34

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…

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

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

#42

Post by fyi80 »

danso wrote: post #29

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 connectio…

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

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

#43

Post by fyi80 »

regis wrote: post #31

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?

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!

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

#44

Post by _9e9r »

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.

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

#47

Post by nemonoko »

Articulate wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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

#48

Post by SilasX »

fyi80 wrote: post #40
eli wrote: post #36

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?…

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.

That'll be the day:

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

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

#49

Post by rthomas6 »

fyi80 wrote: post #43
regis wrote: post #31

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?

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!

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

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

#50

Post by _9e9r »

DanBC wrote: post #9
obviouslygreen wrote: post #5

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/

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 )

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."

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