Blood-suckers Bite Murdoch

*Disclaimer - For anyone who dislikes the use of extended metaphors, I apologise in advance.

Having conquered cinema, fiction and television, vampires have turned their attentions the world of journalism. But this is not a Twilight-esque tale of teenage angst in small town America. No, the mythical beings, which exist by feeding on the blood of living creatures, have infiltrated our traditional media in the form of a new breed of publishers.

Is this part of a global conspiracy by the undead to control our communication channels? Not quite. The technological advances of the 21st century have created a number of news providers that exist with the sole purpose of repackaging existing stories. These range from aggregators to self-titled 'news agencies' that have no intention of sniffing-out original leads or angles themselves.

On Monday (December 2nd), Rupert Murdoch, Managing Director of News International, said that he will place his news sites behind a pay wall -- removing all partnerships with 'vampire' aggregators, as he considers this a form of theft. I maintain, however, that this may have more to do with the contractual legalities of his existing pact with the Devil.

Following the Dirty Digger's comments, Arianna Huffington, founder and editor of the The Huffington Post -- a half-human, half-vampire news provider offering both repackaged and original content, think Wesley Snipes' day-walker character in Blade -- yesterday made a passionate rebuke.

Offering a more nuanced view, the online news innovator suggested that Rupert -- yes we are on first name terms -- has confused aggregation with wholesale misappropriation.

She said: "Be careful what you wish for because as soon as you … start denying your content to other sites that aggregate and link back to the original source, you stand to lose a large part of your traffic overnight."

Unfortunately, having seen the way these organisations work from the inside, I have to agree with Rupert -- not a sentence I ever imagined writing. The majority of these vampires do not exist to inform and entertain their audience. Instead, they are looking for potential consumer markets to feed upon.

The credibility of the internet as a news source is being destroyed by a percentage of these organisations. If they are left to scavenge upon the remaining remnants of our media landscape, forever replicating the same sources over and over again, journalism will lose the one attribute that vampires hold so dear - immortality.

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.