Re:Is It Journalism, or Just a Repackaged Press Release? Her...
by doctorpangloss on Tuesday April 23, 2013 @12:35PM
(#5596172)
The Churnalism concept has been circulating in media/nonprofit think tanks for a couple years now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.