Churnalism isn’t the only problem with our journalism

The launch this week of churnalism.com has put the spotlight on one of the less glorious aspects of the media – the tendency to take a press release and largely reprint it without adding much in the way of analysis, critique or additional content.

However understandable the reasons may sometimes be for churnalism, in particular small budgets and over-pressed staff, the net result is not a good one for a healthy media and was one of the targets of Nick Davies in his seminal attack on modern media standards, Flat Earth News.

Good PR practitioners know this too. Whatever the short-term attraction there may be of seeing your client’s story in print exactly as you would have wanted it, long-term we all benefit from a media that questions stories, forces people to raise their standards and which wins the trust of the public in the process. And a well-crafted story by a journalist can do far more for both subject and reader than many a press release – which is why here at MHP having a journalist call up to talk in detail about a news release is a welcome sign rather than something to be feared.

But other news this week has raised a wider problem: the absence of independent experts on many topics. Take the example of defence spending, in the news again thanks to several senior retired military figures writing a letter attacking defence cuts. Current or former members of a public service saying that their public service should have more money is hardly news, and in itself tells the rest of us very little – is this narrow minded self-interest or genuine matter of public concern? Sometimes it is one, sometimes the other – but as the defence cuts story has shown, without a wide pool of genuinely independent experts to call on, stories far too often get reduced to everyone saying the obvious and predictable – leaving the public without having any way to judge who on that particular occasion is in the right.

Add in the pressure on story length, and the problem that in many areas (particularly those related to public affairs) independent experts are extremely thin on the ground even if you want to involve them in a story, and you often have stories that give you no grounds for making a judgement.

So recycling press releases is a problem, yes, but an even bigger problem are those stories which do not give the reader a chance of making a judgement.