
Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Here's a Tool to Help - hythloday
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/
======
Articulate
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
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...](https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:trustedreviews.com+hugo+jobling+news)

~~~
abraxasz
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.

~~~
guelo
The only way it should be acceptable is if the journalist writes "the company
said X but they stand to make money off of it and I have not verified it."

~~~
Pwnguinz
I used to think that, until I read this:
[http://www.zerohedge.com/content/zero-hedge-conflictsfull-
di...](http://www.zerohedge.com/content/zero-hedge-conflictsfull-disclosure-
policy)

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).
    

* Replace "Zero Hedge" with "News Site", "Blog", etc.

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obviouslygreen
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
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>)

~~~
pp19dd
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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TeMPOraL
For reference, the term "PR Submarine" refers to pg's essay, "The Submarine" -
<http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html>.

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mseebach
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.

~~~
illuminate
"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.

~~~
mseebach
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.

~~~
mpclark
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...

~~~
mseebach
I am indeed being cynical, but I was also trying to play along with the
premise of the article.

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...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-rolf-dobelli)

------
zapdrive
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_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Quotient_\(IQ\)_and_Browser_Usage)

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

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

------
eli
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
> 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.

~~~
eli
Why not? So is a press release never news?

~~~
lostlogin
I agree with both of you. A journalist (in my opinion) shouldn't be someone
who rewrites press releases. Having just finished Robert Fisks column before I
came here, I'm certain of that. Not everyone can be where he is however, and
the small local stories need to be written. Re-writing press releases is a
mile from these situations however - at least read around the subject and
compare/contrast (?pad it out) with what others are doing.

------
kderbe
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...](http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/23/churnalism-technical-
background/)). They've released the core matching code, called SuperFastMatch,
as free software (<https://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch>).

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

------
pp19dd
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.

------
Wonderdonkey
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
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.

------
ignostic
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.

~~~
guelo
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.

------
doctorpangloss
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.

~~~
fyi80
If the PR was circulated privately to a high value, unique target (like
Congress), would you expect an eternal analysis to find it?

------
JonnieCache
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...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-
Distortion/dp/0099512688)

------
danso
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"

~~~
fyi80
Of course, the simple solution to that is that "Exclusive" is never in the
reader's interest.

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

------
Intermernet
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.

------
runjake
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.

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

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regis
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?

~~~
fyi80
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
Unfortunately, when I run the article through the tool it returns no hits.

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sehugg
This would be pretty awesome with a browser plugin.

~~~
hythloday
Here you go: <http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/downloads/>

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

~~~
jcarbaugh
It runs automatically, but only on a whitelist of sites. You can edit the list
in the extension settings.

~~~
notimetorelax
Thanks, good to know.

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

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

------
Create
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_Ch...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_Chomsky_and_the_Media)

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stretchwithme
kudos on the name.

