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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/" rel="nofollow">http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/</a>
For reference, the term "PR Submarine" refers to pg's essay, "The Submarine" - <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a>.
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?<p>Also, there's a certain irony in that this story itself almost certainly is "planted" PR.
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.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Quotient_(IQ)_and_Browser_Usage" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_Quotient_(IQ)_and_...</a>
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 <a href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf</a> ? Is it possible to write about a newly announced iPhone without lifting data from Apple PR events or releases?<p>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.
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" (<a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/23/churnalism-technical-background/" rel="nofollow">http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/04/23/churnalism-tec...</a>). They've released the core matching code, called SuperFastMatch, as free software (<a href="https://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mediastandardstrust/superfastmatch</a>).
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>* other news-gathering organisations are available.
This is really awesome. It's definitely a step in the right direction, anyway.<p>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.<p>Spammers have been known to use a similar trick to re-use company "news" by sending journalists re-written releases as "exclusives."<p>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.
The Churnalism concept has been circulating in media/nonprofit think tanks for a couple years now.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
For an in depth investigation into this phenomenon, see Nick Davies' Flat Earth News:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distortion/dp/0099512688" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.co.uk/Flat-Earth-News-Award-winning-Distor...</a>
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.<p>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"
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.<p>This could all be automated.
Great application. And as always, a healthy dose of skepticism is good.<p>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.
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?