Churnalism.com is an independent, non-profit website built to help the public distinguish between original journalism and ‘churnalism’ – where what appears to be a genuinely journalistic newspaper or online news article turns out to be a recycled press-release, quite possibly from a special-interest group, or self-interested campaigning organisation.
It’s partly because of this habit of journalists – the BBC Health site has been a particular bugbear in the past – that I created the “Positive Political Blogging” campaign, last year. My goals were to mobilise bloggers against churnalism, and to produce a system by which – with the help of a bit of technology – the output of bloggers could become a replacement news service, one whose output was much higher quality, more varied, and less biased than what journalists of the big newspapers and online news sites could find elsewhere (“Harnessing the distributed intelligence of the blogosphere“, I called it.)
Back to Churnalism: their service allows people to run comparisons of press releases – indeed any news article – against the huge Journalisted archive of online newspaper articles. It’ll point out any sections that the journalist seems to have copied and pasted from the article you supply, and give you a score to show just how much of a paste job it was. Why not try some examples? Even better, Churnalism has an API allows developers of other sites to hook into this service.
With that in mind, I’ve hooked Poblish up to try out the new API, and you can see the results on any article page. You can try this one, for starters. The numbers suggest that there were no fewer than 2662 similarities with the Guardian article, which is pretty convincing evidence of widespread copying and pasting.
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In case you’re wondering, Poblish strips out all quotations before passing articles to Churnalism – that way we don’t flag up articles that, quite correctly, refer to the original article or press-release. By contrast, pasting without quotations, without analysis, and without evidence of original thought, is pretty much what this campaign is all about. We expect journalists to do this essential part of their job, just as we hope that bloggers apply much the same principles.
Now, you might be thinking: “Hang on, is Poblish just comparing blog posts and news articles with other news articles? How about tracing these articles back to the hack or PR who first created them?” OK, there’s an element of truth there, but as Poblish expands its coverage I’d like to see us aggregating more of the press-releases and think-pieces too, and to use our existing – and Churnalism’s new – analysis tools to make this kind of research a breeze for readers.
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Final thoughts: yes, I’m very impressed with the Churnalism API, though I’d really like to see, if possible:
- Article titles, not just URLs (see above).
- Links back to Churnalism’s own beautifully user-friendly result pages – just showing the number of matches isn’t very compelling – and / or:
- More results and statistics I could render myself.
All in all, a great start! Hope to show you more developments in due course…
A selection of the most interesting feeds Poblish makes available can be found in the new Feed Galleries section on the 