The Dark Arts of Churnalism

I am a 23-year-old graduate trying to break into the world of journalism. So far, my experiences of the industry have been limited to exploring the dark arts of churnalism, which seems as good a place as any to start this blog.

A phrase coined by the BBC's Waseem Zakir, churnalism is the process of regurgitating press releases, wire stories and existing news output to create articles without fact checking or further research. My current employer, who shall remain nameless because of the insatiable appetite of its legally-trained attack dogs, is the da Vinci of churnalism's dark arts. Drawing in eager young university-leavers with the job title News Correspondent, the 'news agency' then removes the smokescreen of its marketing guff to reveal the rotting entrails of a glorified press release provider.

Expected to write between 25 and 30 stories a day -- while also sub-editing a similar number, uploading these stories to a content management system and personally dealing with any client issues -- the life of a churnalist at [blank] is an unenviable one. On top of this, these inhabitants of a sinister building in the shadows of Canary Wharf are slowly playing their part in the final act of the death of journalism.

The British journalist Nick Davies illustrated the severity of the problem in his book Flat Earth News. He cited research conducted at Cardiff University, which discovered that 80 per cent of the stories in Britain's quality press were not original. Remember this is the quality press -- The Times, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and The Daily Mail. The types of newspapers expected to aid the democratic process and serve the public interest - ok, maybe not the Daily Mail. But still, if this figure is so high for former Fleet Street institutions, imagine the proportion of ill-informed, repackaged 'news' consumed by internet users.

Commenting on the causes of this trend, Mr Davies said in 2008: "Now, more than ever in the past, we are likely to engage in the mass production of ignorance because the corporations and the accountants who have taken us over have stripped out our staffing, increased our output and ended up chaining us to our desks."

As a self-confessed writer of churnalism myself -- albeit a dissatisfied writer -- I can wholeheartedly vindicate Mr Davies's claims. 'Journalists' working for the unnamed agency, which makes George Orwell's Ministry of Truth look like a beacon of objectivity, are not even afforded the luxury of a telephone. A telephone! Working on 15 minute deadlines for every story, young churnalists instead rely on the wise teachings of Wikipedia – the oracle of truth for lazy writers.

The decline in traditional journalism had been lamented by London-dwelling media types and academics long before the phrase churnalism was ever uttered. Bob Franklin, Professor of Journalism Studies at Cardiff University, adopted George Ritzer's metaphor of the McDonaldization of society to describe the increasing emphasis placed on efficiency, predictability and control by news executives across the UK press. This is most easily seen in the freesheet Metro, which is essentially a 'sound-bite newspaper' made up of sub-editors.

Quantity and standardisation have replaced quality and variety as valuable commodities in the newsrooms of the UK, and unless McNugget journalism is replaced by the well-researched stories written by knowledgeable writers, churnalism will prevail. And believe me, you do not want that.