PR Company, Internet Marketing

Churnalism

In the last two days the ‘Churnalism’ story has sparked a great discussion in the PR world. A new website has been launched by the Media Standards Trust to expose the true extent of how many news stories began life as a press release… and how many have been published in almost entirely their original form.

If you suspect that a press release has been poorly edited and passed off as journalism you can go to churnalism.com and copy and paste in the article so you can see for yourself whether your suspicions were correct. However, no PR company will ever complain that their press release resulted in coverage!

In PR, the purpose of writing a press release is to make it easy for a journalist to identify what the story is and then write good things about your client. A good PR company will only send press releases to relevant media and an even better PR company will tailor it for their audience to ensure that as many publications as possible agree that your client’s news is newsworthy to their readership.

However, why should a well-researched and well-written press release be passed over on principle? That isn’t how this industry works. We all have a job to do and as a PR person, if we keep our releases tight and relevant to those who we send them to then maybe the problem lies with journalists and the publications they work for?

Are you surprised that the BBC is one of the worst offenders for ‘churnalism’? With the pressure to provide a good level of local and political news at the same time as having to working against the financial cuts news organisations have had to make, can we really blame journalists? It is the journalists who are struggling to meet harsh deadlines in a world where news is expected to be instant – and to be first to publish really matters. Cutbacks in news organisations where news rooms are short-staffed have helped the trend grow and held standards back from improvement. PR professionals largely outnumber journalists in this contracting industry and it may be unfair to label some journalists as lazy with this in mind.

The hope is that by highlighting this issue, news organisations will see the error of their ways, find new ways of raising revenue and start funding news again so the reader gets what they want, the journalist is no longer under-paid and stressed into an early grave and PR agencies can fulfil their objectives in more creative ways and get real news attracting attention for clients.

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