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Journalism or ‘churnalism’ - what happens in your newsroom?

Posted by Dominic Ponsford on 31 January 2008 at 10:38
Tags: Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Indepedent, Journalism, Journalists, PR

Guardian writer Nick Davies launches a searing indictment of what he calls “churnalism” in this week’s Press Gazette.

Citing new research carried out by Cardiff University’s journalism department - he claims that 80 per cent of home news stories in the main quality UK national newspapers are at least partially made up of recycled material from the PR industry or news agencies.

Looking at newspapers on a case-by-case basis, the study - which looked at 2,000 stories over two weeks last year - found that 69 per cent of home news stories in The Times were wholly or mainly made up of PR and/or wire copy. The proportions for other newspapers were: The Daily Telegraph: 68 per cent; The Daily Mail, 66 per cent; The Independent: 65 per cent and The Guardian: 52 per cent.

The research also claims that less Fleet Street staff journalists are now producing three times as many pages as they did 20 years ago.

Davies also looks at the diary of a regional newspaper reporter - who over a week said they produced 48 stories, worked 45.5 hours and spent just three hours out of the office.

Davies’ description of newsrooms where journalists just churn out copy - because they have no time to do anything else - doesn’t ring true for Press Gazette.

Perhaps I would say that, but we try to strike a balance between - moving quickly, covering a lot of ground and, yes, churning out stories - and picking our targets to dig deeper, explore the issues and investigate.

The description of life on a regional daily in his report does sound very familiar. But don’t canny and experienced reporters even in very busy newsrooms just need to become quick enough at turning around the more straight forward bread and butter stories to free them up to get out of the office and spend more time investigating those essential off-diary exclusives?

Hasn’t journalism always included a degree of “churning it out” - or is Davies right, have matters considerably worsened in the last 20 years?

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Tags: Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Indepedent, Journalism, Journalists, PR

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1. The Wire | Press Gazette&hellip |  31 January 2008 at 10.44am

   Journalism or ‘churnalism’ - what happens in your newsroom?Posted by Press Gazette on 31 January 2008 at 09:38 Tags: Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Indepedent, Journalism, Journalists, PR Guardian writer Nick Davies launches a searing indictment of what he calls

2. Christnotanother: Journal&hellip |  31 January 2008 at 8.32pm

   [...] colleague Nina pointed me to this piece from the press gazette today:http://blogs.pressgazette.co.uk/editor/2008/01/31/journalism-or-churnalism-what-happens-in-your-news…Essentially, Nick Davies is bemoaning what he calls the rise of ‘churnalism’. Citing new research [...]

3. Charles on… anythin&hellip |  31 January 2008 at 10.30pm

   [...] at the editor’s blog on Press Gazette… Guardian writer Nick Davies launches a searing indictment of what he calls “churnalism” in [...]

4. Andy Williams |  1 February 2008 at 1.27pm

   Hi - I was involved with the research at Cardiff. If anyone wants to find out more they can follow the link to our full report (a distinct entity from Nick’s book) in this press release (oh, the irony):
   http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/en/school/39/419.html

5. Andy Williams |  1 February 2008 at 1.33pm

   On your point about this not ringing true, and wondering whether anything’s changed that radically in the last 20 years, Dominic…
   I think to answer that you only have to look at the sheer volume of copy that most national newspaper journalists are asked to produce now, and compare that with what they were expected to produce then.
   As Nick says in his piece, we found that while the number of journalists in the national press has remained fairly static, they now produce three times as much copy as they did twenty years ago. More detailed info on this can be found in the report.
   We didn’t look at the regional press, and there is a slightly different picture there. But the outcome is the same, I’d say. Research has consistently shown that staffing levels have fallen dramatically in regional/local newsrooms. This has led by neccessity to a change in newsroom culture, a move to airconditioned journalism, and more reliance on agencies and PR than ever.

6. Martin Stabe&hellip |  1 February 2008 at 1.39pm

   Editor’s Blog: Journalism or ‘churnalism’ - what happens in your newsroom?

7. Ger |  6 February 2008 at 11.02pm

   Having worked as a journalist for more than 20 years, I can definitely say churnalism has increased. Last year I worked in a newsroom where it was the norm rather than the exception.

   By the way, it’s a myth that churnalists are too busy to get their own stories.

   Churnalism is actually more labour-intensive because reporters waste time rewriting agency copy and collating press releases when they could be out getting fresh news or at least querying the people who have sent the press-releases.

   It’s easy to spot a piece of churnalism; after reading it, you will be left with lots of unanswered questions, there will be holes in the story and it will look as if it has been written by someone with a bad hangover - which is exactly how it feels to write-up a second-hand “exclusive” interview.

   It’s also more costly to employ lots of freelances as copy-rewriters, while still paying a freelance agency - whose own staff simply monitor the TV and radio news and regurgitate it.

   Maybe it’s a green thing: reduce, recycle, re-use…and what the readers are left with is rubbish.

8. Meagain |  11 February 2008 at 3.10am

   I agree with what Nick Davies says, but not that it is necessarily the agencies like the PA that generate this.
   Back in the early 80s, I was freelancing as a reporter on one of the red tops when the story about a raucous end-of-term Parliament party on the terrace of the Palace of Westminster broke. The allegation was that at the MPs’ bash a woman was held by her ankles upside down dangling over the Thames and that her Upstairs Assets were thus exposed to passing river traffic passengers, crew and passers-by on the far bank.
   I spent all day running up and down the Thames riverside, on pleasure cruisers and generally trying to track down anyone who could reveal the identity of the woman so that someone else could get to her and find out which party folk amongst the Parliamentarians had been involved.
   I drew a blank, but not before gleeful ships’ captains and crews had led me and opposition reporters a merry dance by feeding us a load of false leads which we knew were probably not true but were too scared not to follow up.
   We were all terrified of going back to the office with nothing - only to discover when the first editions dropped that another reporter had found something.
   Not long afterwards, the mystery woman was miraculously “found” - and obligingly posed seductively on a wall on the Embankment with the Houses of Parliament in the background.
   The week after that, it emerged that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt by the woman’s spinmeisters executed to launch her on a modelling career or boost a flagging one.
   The point is, in between all of us racing endlessly around that hot summer’s day pretending to be tourists on pleasure steamers, eying each other up nervously and practically manhandling anyone we thought could give us a lead, we all privately agreed amongst ourselves that the story was a load of tosh. But anyone, including myself, who suggested as much to our respective newsdesks were given short shrift and told to get on with it.
   We were all – editors, news desks and reporters - just as guilty of disseminating and perpetuating what turned turned out to be a non-story. The real story was all of us being hoodwinked into trying to get the story-that-never-was.
   However, the one good thing is that at least there were the resources for every paper to send reporters like myself out to check it. If Nick Davies is right, today it would merely be re-written from whatever source it came from in the first place and slammed in the newspapers - under a staffer’s byline of course!

9. "Churnalism"? - Messy Med&hellip |  13 February 2008 at 2.26pm

   [...] stuff from Nick Davies in the Press Gazette today. He’s citing research from Cardiff University’s journalism department which suggests that 80% of [...]

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