I have to take my hat off to Tom Scott, the chap behind Journalism Warning Labels. We’re entering into a new gruesome age of ‘churnalism‘ such as the world has never experienced, which makes it as good a time as any to help fight the disease.

The idea is to print off stickers and stick them physically onto free newspapers in the cities, to ensure that at least some folk understand how little information in newspapers is actually genuine, rather than PR generated.

 

The other very cool thing is the Newscrud service, which lets you do the same with news websites, using virtual stickers. So now there’s no excuse. If you see anything a little dodgy in your fave news outlet on or offline, tag it, so others can benefit. Now all we need is some way to improve things rather than just moan.

 Churnalism is a form of journalism in which press releases, wire stories and other forms of pre-packaged material are used to create articles in newspapers and other news media in order to meet increasing pressures of time and cost without undertaking further research or checking…In his book Flat Earth News, the British journalist Nick Davies reported a study at Cardiff University by Professor Justin Lewis and a team of researchers which found that 80% of the stories in Britain’s quality press were not original and that only 12% of stories were generated by reporters.