There is a particular kind of news story you have read a thousand times without ever noticing what it is. A company "announces" something. A charity "reveals" a shocking new figure. A study "finds" that your favourite snack is secretly a superfood. The story has a reporter's name on it, a newspaper's logo above it, and the general shape of journalism — and almost every word in it was written by somebody whose job is to make you think well of the thing being described. * That process has a name. It is called churnalism, and once you can see it you cannot stop seeing it. * The word is a mash-up of "churn" and "journalism", and it is credited to BBC journalist Waseem Zakir, who used it to describe what had happened to his own trade. His summary of the change is brutal in its plainness: reporters used to go out and find stories, and now, in his words, "you get copy coming in on the wires and reporters churn it out." Proactive became reactive. Finding became processing. * The term went global in 2008, when the British reporter Nick Davies built a book around it. For "Flat Earth News", Davies did something almost nobody in journalism does: he pointed the investigative machinery at journalism itself. He commissioned researchers at Cardiff University's School of Journalism, led by Professor Justin Lewis, to trace where news stories actually come from. * The team took 2,207 stories from the outlets Britain treats as its serious press — The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, and in some cases the Daily Mail — and tried to find each story's origin. * The result is the single most useful number in media literacy. Roughly 60% of those stories came wholly or mainly from wire copy, PR material, or both. Another 20% contained clear elements of PR. Only about 12% were generated by the reporters themselves. * Read that again with the byline in mind. Eight out of ten stories in Britain's most respected newspapers were, to some meaningful degree, somebody else's press release wearing a journalist's name. * ### Why this happens, and why it is not really the reporter's fault * It would be very satisfying to blame lazy hacks. It would also be wrong, and it would let the actual culprits walk. * Here is the arithmetic. The Pew Research Center tracked American newsroom employment and found it fell about 26% between 2008 and 2020 — from roughly 114,000 newsroom employees to about 85,000. At newspapers specifically the collapse was far worse: newspaper newsroom jobs fell by more than half over that stretch. * Now hold that against the other side of the table. The public relations industry did not shrink over those same years. It expanded, professionalised, and learned to write in perfect house style. Every hospital trust, police force, council, football club, oil major and government department now employs people whose entire job is to produce publication-ready copy and hand it to a reporter who has four stories to file before lunch. * So you have fewer journalists, filing more stories, faster, against an ever-larger supply of free, polished, pre-written material. Churnalism is not a moral failure. It is what happens when you cut the newsroom in half and then act surprised that the gap gets filled by whoever is willing to fill it for free. * And "for free" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. PR copy is free at the point of use and extremely expensive downstream — it costs you an accurate picture of the world. * ### How to spot churnalism in about fifteen seconds * You do not need media training. You need four habits. * **1. Look for the verb "announces" — and then ask who benefits.** Real reporting usually involves somebody who did not want the story published. If every named party in a story sounds pleased about it, you are probably reading a press release with better punctuation. * **2. Count the independent voices.** A churned story quotes the organisation, and then quotes the organisation's spokesperson, and then quotes a "leading expert" who turns out to work for the organisation's trade body. A reported story contains at least one person the subject would rather you had not heard from. * **3. Check whether anyone left the building.** Genuine reporting leaves fingerprints: a location, a document, a number the reporter had to request, a "when contacted by this newspaper". Churnalism has none of these because nobody went anywhere. * **4. Search one distinctive sentence.** This is the killer move, and it takes ten seconds. Copy an odd phrase from the story — "a step change in patient outcomes", that sort of thing — and search it in quotation marks. If the identical sentence appears in eleven outlets on the same morning, nobody wrote it. Somebody distributed it. * That last trick was once automated. The Media Standards Trust built a tool called Churnalism, launched in the UK in 2011, that let anyone paste an article and see how much of it matched a press release in its database. The tool is long gone. The technique still works, because you already have a search engine. * ### The awkward part: churnalism is not always lying * This is where honest media criticism has to slow down. A press release is not automatically false. When a rail operator issues a statement about a timetable change, printing that statement is genuinely useful. When a research university announces a study, the announcement is usually accurate about what the study says. * The damage churnalism does is subtler than falsehood, and worse than falsehood, because it is unfalsifiable. It is a question of who gets to decide what counts as news. * If 80% of the stories in front of you originated with somebody who had the budget to employ a communications team, then the news agenda belongs to whoever can afford press officers. Corporations can. Government departments can. Big charities and think tanks can — and the think tank's funding rarely makes it into paragraph two. * A tenants' union cannot. A group of care workers cannot. A bereaved family fighting an institution cannot. They have no communications department, no embargoed copy, no ready-made quote, so they have to be *found* — and finding is exactly the activity that got cut. * Churnalism does not fill the paper with lies. It fills the paper with the world as described by people who could afford to describe it. That is a quieter distortion and a far more permanent one. * ### Where churnalism ends and normal journalism begins * Two things are often confused with churnalism and should not be. * Wire copy is not automatically churnalism. Agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters employ actual reporters who actually go to the actual place, and a local paper reprinting a Reuters dispatch from Kyiv is doing something reasonable. It becomes churnalism when the wire story is reprinted with no added reporting *and* presented as the outlet's own work. The tell is the dateline and the credit line, which is why it is worth knowing how wire services operate. * Aggregation is not automatically churnalism either. A story built by reading eleven other stories and honestly saying so is a service. A story built by reading one other story and pretending you did the work is not. * The dividing line, every time, is the same: did anyone add anything, and did they tell you where the rest came from? * ### What to do with this * Do not stop reading the news. That is the conclusion people reach when they learn this stuff, and it is the worst possible outcome — a public that trusts nothing is much easier to govern than a public that checks things. * Do something smaller and more useful. When a story matters to you, spend fifteen seconds on the four checks above. Notice which outlets consistently include the voice that did not want to be quoted. Notice which ones publish the same sentence as everyone else at 6am and call it an exclusive. * Then pay attention to the stories that are obviously not churn — the ones with documents, locations, refusals to comment, and lawyers hovering over every paragraph. Those cost money. They exist because somebody funded a reporter to spend three months finding something nobody sent them. * That is the whole argument for supporting journalism, and it is not a sentimental one. Every subscription is a vote on the ratio: 12% found, 60% churned. Somebody is going to decide what makes the news. Right now, for most of the page, it is not a journalist.