Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
[1]https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:trustedreviews.com+hu...
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.
In particular:
| The reality is, critical readers should read analytic
| posts and the rest of Zero Hedge* with the blanket
| assumption that the author is totally "conflicted."
| (Phrased more logically, that the author stands to
| benefit from being right--imagine that).
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.
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."
Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR.
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.
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.
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...
I think worrying over the influence of PR amounts to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, "news" ("The lie that something important happens every day") is much more fundamentally broken, as per this article that was discussed a while ago:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf...
Perhaps the business model would fail less if you made the companies pay for their product placement versus giving them billions of dollars in free adspace? I'd rather the adverts get called out explicitly versus lazy rehashings of an uninteresting, possibly factually inaccurate release that someone used as the majority of their "story". It's not interesting, it's not insightful.
Neither do users.
This also covers the ad-supported local/national or cable subscription-based news coverage. Neither are "free", but all of them (and especially the 24/7 media) fall victim to regurgitating these releases as "news" to fill the gap where "expensive" news would do far more good in between the celebrity gossip.
Well, the Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit organisation, so it's certainly not quite the same as the article is describing.
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".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Quotient_(IQ)_and_...
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.
No, but writing about the newly announced iPhone shouldn't really be called journalism.
When sources are not cited, we have PR or lies masquerading as journalism.
"According to a press release by [organization], '[entire rest of article]'."
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.
* other news-gathering organisations are available.
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.
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.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distor...
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"
This could all be automated.
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.
It ironically drives home the very point of their app, which perhaps was intentional by Rosen!