Catching the 'Scissors and paste' merchants

Lazy journalists have done it for years – now there’s a website that can catch them at it!
Churnalism.com allows anyone to paste in a block of text and compare it with material published on the web.  Matches show up the guilty parties.

But the site isn't really about catching journalists who are ripping off their colleagues' work, it is designed to 'catch' hacks who are simply cutting and paste press releases – this is ‘Churnalism’, according to the Media Standards Trust whose site it is.

‘Churnalism’, the term, is the creation of British journalist Nick Davies who coined it in his book Flat Earth News.  He reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers that found 80 per cent of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original and that only 12 per cent were generated by reporters.  The end result, he argued, is a reduction of quality and accuracy as the published material is open to manipulation and distortion by paying customers – i.e. the clients who pay Public Relations professionals to promote their businesses.

This whole murky area is, of course, linked to the so-called Search Engine Optimizers (SEO’s), who draft copy and web sites to include key words and search terms so that they feature highly in Google’s searches.  This is a multi-multi-million pound business for ‘Content Farms’ such as, (allegedly), Demand Media in the USA.

‘Content Farms’ set out to attract search traffic by hoovering up (mostly) poor quality text or cutting and pasting it from other websites’ original content.

Now (March, 2011) Google has announced a change to its search engine, which they say will improve the quality of search results.  They don’t say so explicitly, but most industry experts think Google is targeting content farms.

This is all fascinating stuff, but as someone with feet (sort of) in both camps I haven’t made my mind up yet whether this is a ‘good thing’ or not.  I shall return to this subject in later blogs.

More thoughtful industry reporting here: PR Week.