Have You Noticed How Many More And Bigger Pictures There Are In Your Newspaper These Days And How Little Original Reporting There Is -- How Else Are They To Fill The Editorial Space With Fewer Journalists?

Philip Stone February 28, 2008

There’s a new word entering our journalistic language – churnalism -- and it comes from a book just printed in the UK that already has the lawyers racking up their fees and some senior journalists and editors furious, but so far there hasn’t really been any evidence to prove false the basic concept of the book – that the vast majority of UK journalism is not original.

And if that’s the case in the UK then where else?

The book, Flat Earth News by Nick Davies, also discusses honesty and how the media is “spun” to write what others want it to write, but it’s the churnalism that catches our eye because the figures are somewhat staggering. And Davies has pedigree that gives him added standing as an award-winning Guardian investigative reporter.

Armed with a corporate donation from the Rowntree Foundation, Davies got the Cardiff University Journalism Department to study domestic news printed in the UK’s leading quality newspapers over a two week period and the report said that only 12% of stories were completely original, another 8% were iffy, but there was no doubt the remaining 80% of the stories were “wholly, mainly, or partially” taken from other sources such as news agencies or PR releases. And because journalists have so much to do the book claims that accuracy suffers since they don’t have time to check out as many facts as they should.

In other words, journalism has become churnalism. According to the book, 69% of The Times domestic copy is made up of agency and/or PR material, 68% of the Daily Telegraph, 66% of The Daily Mail, 65% of the Independent, and 52% of The Guardian. That led the researchers to conclude that the data “portrays a picture of journalism in which any meaningful independent journalistic activity by the press is the exception rather than the rule. We are not talking about investigative  journalism here, but the everyday practices of news judgment, fact checking, balance, criticizing and interrogating sources, etc. that are, in theory, central to routine, day-to-day journalism.”

And the PR people have never had it so good. More and more of their material is getting into print and if the PR guys can get a news agency to use their material then that’s the real winning story because, the thinking goes, if the news agency accepts the PR information it then it must be so – or at least the news agency can be blamed if the information is wrong.

The university researchers also found that while UK newspapers editorially have been getting fatter and fatter over the past 20 years with new sections and the like, the number of journalists working in the UK national press has remained pretty static That means, according to the researchers, that each journalist now writes three times as much copy as 20 years ago. Another perfect recipe for less original reporting.

Davies really went after the old Fleet Street tradition of slightly rewriting agency material to make it seem as if the newspaper originated it. “It’s mad that reporters spend so much time rewriting agency copy so that their newspapers can pretend that their reporters have worked on it.” The Cardiff research found that 70% of domestic stories were made up wholly, mainly or partially of agency copy, but only 1% of such stories openly admitted such use.

That supported this writer’s experience when he worked for UPI in the early 1970s in Bouverie Street, off Fleet Street and across from the Sun and the News of the World. The first editions of the national newspapers would come in around 11 p.m and scanning through the foreign pages UPI editors were amazed continually to see how many of their stories were printed with “From Our Correspondent” as the byline, or in some cases the newspaper actually rewrote the first paragraph lead, otherwise maintaining the rest of the original agency copy, but the story still carried the “From Our Correspondent” byline. 

Fleet Street’s reviews of Davies’ book have been, surprisingly, mostly positive although reviewers were quick to point out what they say are factual errors about specific publications – particularly the claim about the Observer being a mouthpiece for the British government going into the Iraq war.  The Independent newspaper pretty much sums up Fleet Street’s view, “My impression is that Davies makes a powerful case for the prosecution. The commercialism of British newspapers by faceless corporations has damaged honest reporting more than a previous generation of ideological newspaper barons did. There is a depressing amount of bland ‘churnalism’ going on and only the most deluded will deny it.”

The Spectator wrote, “Nick Davies has amassed an overwhelming weight of evidence that the British media lies, distorts facts and routinely breaks the law. …his book should be read by every reporter, editor and proprietor as well as newspaper readers .” And the Daily Telegraph wrote, “As an industry, we are less and less good at telling the truth, and it does Nick Davies credit to stand up and say so.”

Cross the Atlantic and can the same be said for US papers? According to a recent Forbes Magazine article, the Associated Press accounts for up to 40% or more of many an American newspaper’s daily news content. American newspapers for the most part are pretty good about sourcing news agency copy so it’s not such a dark secret there of how much agency copy is being used.

And whereas the British papers have enlarged editorial space from 20 years ago, albeit without increasing the number of journalists, in the US the editorial space is gradually being reduced, but the percentage of journalists being fired is more than that reduction in editorial space.

Hence, larger and more pictures.