Churnalism

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

‘Churnalism’ is a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added.

The Sunlight Foundation and the Media Standards Trust launched Churnalism US, “a new web tool and browser extension that allows anyone to compare the news you read against existing content to uncover possible instances of plagiarism” (churned from their blog post).

The new tool is inspired by the UK site “churnalism.com” (a project of the Media Standards Trust). According to the FAQ of Churnalism.com:

‘Churnalism’ is a news article that is published as journalism, but is essentially a press release without much added. In his landmark book, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies wrote how ‘churnalism’ is produced by “Journalists who are no longer gathering news but are reduced instead to passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or false” (p.59).

According to the Cardiff University research that informed Davies’ book, 54% of news articles have some form of PR in them. The word ‘churnalism’ has been attributed to BBC journalist Waseem Zakir.

“Of course not all churnalism is bad. Some press releases are clearly in the public interest (medical breakthroughs, government announcements, school closures and so on). But even in these cases, it is better that people should know what press release the article is based on than for the source of the article to remain hidden.”

In a detailed blog post, Drew Vogel, a developer on Churnalism US, explains the nuts and bolts behind the site, which is fueled by a full-text search database named SuperFastMatch.

Kaitlin Devine, another developer on Churnalism, provides a two-minute tutorial on how Churnalism US works:

The GovLab

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Steven Johnson, author of Future Perfect : “Peer-to-Patent stands as one of my favorite examples of peer progressive thinking at work. It brings in outside minds not directly affiliated with the government to help the government solve the problems it faces, effectively making a more porous boundary between citizen and state….I say all this to explain why I’m excited to be flying to NY tonight to help Noveck with her latest project, the Governance Lab at NYU, an extended, multidisciplinary investigation in new forms of participatory governance, backed by the Knight Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation…
I wrote Future Perfect in large part to capture all the thrilling new experiments and research into peer collaboration that I saw flourishing all around me, and to give those diverse projects the umbrella name of peer progressivism so that they could be more easily conceived as a unified movement. But I also wrote the book with the explicit assumption that we had a lot to learn about these systems. For starters, peer networks take a number of different forms: crowdfunding projects like Kickstarter are quite different from crowd-authored projects like open source software or Wikipedia; prize-backed challenges are a completely different beast altogether. For movement-building, it’s important to stress the commonalities between these different networks, but for practical application, we need to study the distinctions. And we need to avoid the easy assumption that decentralized, peer-based approaches will always outperform centralized ones.

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, Knopf, 2013
Scientific American: “Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, and Cohen, director of Google Ideas and a foreign policy wonk who has advised Hillary Clinton, deliver their vision of the future in this ambitious, fascinating account. For gadget geeks, the book is filled with tantalizing examples of futuristic goods and services: robotic plumbers; automated haircuts; computers that read body language; and 3-D holographs of weddings projected into the living rooms of relatives who couldn’t attend. Not surprisingly, the authors are bullish on how connectivity—access to the Internet that will soon be nearly universal—will transform education, terrorism, journalism, government, privacy and war. The result, they argue, though not perfect, will be “more egalitarian, more transparent and more interesting than we can even imagine.”

Seeing is believing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times , reviewing the new book of film academic Stephen Apkon called The Age of the Image , argues that “The written word is becoming the language of a scholarly establishment”:
“Until recently, it was the essence of statesmanship, scholarship and justice to purge strong emotion from our deliberations. Images today, though, are so plentiful and sharp that they dominate our thought processes. Although Mr Apkon relishes the immediacy of YouTube, he fears that political advertisers will soon be able to craft stories around “hidden mental hungers”, easily manipulating voters.
Citizens tend to think about voting in one of two ways. First, you base your vote on your identity. You are a farmer, so you choose the candidate best disposed towards farmers. The second theory is that you vote on arguments, independent of identity. You believe a sales tax should replace income tax, so you vote for the candidate who shares that opinion. But today’s image-based communication has little to do with identity or arguments. It has to do with the lowest-common-denominator traits that mark you as a human animal.”