As a former PR person I can tell you that this ap is AWESOME. the general public has no idea how much of their "news" is actually just corporate created "infomercials" I don't even mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist- but it is truly shocking when as an intern I would write press releases and then later that night hear my exact words said on the evening news. This is especially true of newspapers who are trying to create reams of content but with far fewer journalists. If this app works as well as they claim- this is a game changer.
I'll agree to "AWESOME" but won't give you "game changer."
The only way this will be a game changer is if we the audience hold media accountable for its content. I feel like if that was in the cards, there is plenty of readily available evidence to bolster claims of poor quality.
Moreover, is not the first app of this nature. Take the human-powered Newstrust.net (now run by Poyter I believe), which has crafted quantitive measures of "journalistic quality." It was another "awesome" model - but it's not widely used. No tool can hold news organizations accountable when its readers do not.
I never quite published a press release verbatim in all the news stories I have written[1], but sometimes the information density of a press release is so low as to make a rewrite look like a copy anyway.
I don't think there is a problem with press releases, as long as journalists acknowledge them for what they are: press releases. It's fine imho for a newspaper to reproduce a press releases verbatim, if it makes it clear to the reader that no post-processing has been done.
What is not ok is to trick the reader into believing that a piece of information has received adequate treatment, when it really hasn't. There's an implicit contract of trust between the newspaper and the reader, and if that app does what it advertises, it will make the contract harder to breach.
The only way it should be acceptable is if the journalist writes "the company said X but they stand to make money off of it and I have not verified it."
| The reality is, critical readers should read analytic
| posts and the rest of Zero Hedge* with the blanket
| assumption that the author is totally "conflicted."
| (Phrased more logically, that the author stands to
| benefit from being right--imagine that).
* Replace "Zero Hedge" with "News Site", "Blog", etc.
I hate PR churn, and love the Churnalism app, but a lot more will be needed to stop the flood of low quality content. It would be great to have a browser-based tool to identify, tag, and filter bad journalism--kind of like a SPAM-filter for your brain.
