Should there be punishment for Churnalism?

Churnalism. The very notion of the word creates images of people chewing up copies of newspapers and spitting it onto the head of a journalist. Luckily, the “churn” is all about the stories, which is good as I would be nervous enough on my first day at a newspaper – the last thing I would need to worry about would be being eaten.  Anyway, I’ve drifted. Churnalism is the turning of press releases into news stories, often with little or no editing or additional sources/facts added.

The world of journalism seems to be in two sides about this, one half are very vocal about it and they will often boldly call Churnalism the death of journalism. The other half are simply churnalists who regurgitate the opinions of the first half. I personally believe it to be a very bad thing to hit journalism, especially as I’ve only studied the subject for a year and I could re-create churnalism. So what is the point of me continuing?  Let’s hope there is more too it or else I am paying far too much money and wasting two years to do a job of a churnalist I could easily start tomorrow.

In the “defence” of churnalism, it can be difficult to keep up with the world of 24/7 news and so much must be coming into newspapers and internet news sites that it must be difficult to sift through stories, but the solution of  ‘just hire more journalists!’ seems so painfully logical that it must have been suggested. The more journalists who can work on a story surely must mean that the story can be finished quicker and to a better, non-regurgitated standard?

I presume that many journalists who are made to ‘churn’ often do it out of wanting to keep their job as apposed to actually wanting to take the lazy option out of the situation, I would hope that journalists would think that way at least. However, the boring repetitiveness of churnalism must get the people down as just regurgitating press releases to send out as copy really requires no flair and no passion for the job or any skill. (This is not to mean that I see myself as unskilled, without passion or flair as I mentioned my ease on making churnalism earlier.)

With press conferences becoming news makers, journalism can be accused of flooding the press with pseudo events, the idea that news is becoming far too inundated with so called “news” which is nothing more than fabricated, premeditated, prearranged events that are easily for journalists to report on because they are preset and are often a story waiting to be written, an example being an interview with a movie star or a music awards show. I do believe that the news could easily snow ball into becoming purely pseudo events if such aspects as churnalism go on unstopped.

Websites such as Churnalism are great at showing us what it is but surely someone needs to be stopping churnalism, it’s almost like having a website showing where robberies are taking place, but if no-one is doing anything about it then it is utterly pointless. Maybe, however, there is too much pleasure from those in power about how cheap, quick and easy churnalism can be that they don’t really want to change it, they would be quite happy to see the whole 6o’clock news programme contain press releases.

Where does this leave journalists? are we one day going to just print press releases without it being churnalised into copy? Will the journalist soon just be a ‘CCPist’ (a cut, copy and paste journalist)? Simply, pasting everyone elses work and presenting it without ever getting recognition or being able to show true talent?

It seems as if we are stuck between a rock and a churned place, everyone seems to be standing in the middle with their knees shaking, no-one seems to be actually doing anything. Do you stand and watch a tractor approach you and cut you up into pieces or do you run? Someone needs to decide what we’re doing soon or else we’ll all be churned up and forgetting what our own voices sound like.