Week 9 - PR and 'Churnalism'

Changing Skylines: Auckland Town Hall Clock Tower with the Sky Tower lurking behind. Photo: Danielle Hutchinson.

This week’s reading highlighted that ‘news is now a shared, co-produced, recycled and republished commodity’ (Johnston and Rowney, 2018), a phenomenon which has been referred to as ‘churnalism’ (Davies, 2008).

I had assumed that the repurposing of content was largely due to the tailoring of news for different platforms, but Johnston and Rowney suggest that it's also due to the reduction in number of journalists compared to the number of PRPs.

Combined with the pressure to complete more stories across multiple platforms, there's an understandable reliance on PR as a source of news.

My key takeaway was that PR has a commercial agenda, rather than a news agenda, so it’s our responsibility as journalists to pursue further details and potentially reframe the angle, rather than simply republishing a media release.

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References

Johnston, J. and Rowney, K. (2018). Chapter 1: Managing content, platforms and relationships in a transmedia environment. In Media strategies: managing content, platforms and relationships (pp. 1-22). Allen & Unwin.

Davies (2008). Cited in above.