Churnalism

Abstract

Just under a decade ago the term “churnalism” moved into mainstream journalism discourse, describing in less-than-complimentary terms the recycling process of news production which drew increasingly on wire service copy and public relations (PR) subsidies. Davies’ 2008 book Flat Earth News and Cardiff University researchers Lewis, Williams, and Franklin (2008) were to popularise the term that would become part of the vernacular of an industry on the brink of major change. To be fair, the concept of “churn” and churnalists was earlier coined by Tony Harcup in his book Journalism (Harcup 2004), in which he cites BBC journalist Waseen Zakir’s description of how wire service copy had eroded original news production. However, the “assembly line in the news factory” and the “two primary conveyor belts” of wire services and PR (Davies 2008, 74) were to be seared into the journalistic psyche forever by Davies’ polemic, which laid the blame of churnalism on the “dark arts”, “pseudo-events” and out-ofcontrol commercialism.