A churnalism solution

In Flat Earth News, a book that is one of the most controversial about journalism in the last few years, Nick Davies suggests that – due to an increasing work load (more pages to fill, podcasts to produce, blogs to write) newspaper journalists in the UK have become nothing more than churnalists.

Or – people shoving words on to a page and then moving those words around, copying them to other places, altering them slightly for another platform, copying extra bits from a press release and hoping its enough to fill the many pages crying for content.

The argument is that, as journalists are given more space to fill and more work to do – the quality of the journalism itself reduces. An equation could be (workload + journalists available = quality) so if workload increases and journalists available reduces then quality also reduces – or something like that.

So a solution is need to this growing problem. Basically lower incomes from advertising and sales lead to lower budgets which lead to fewer journalists being employed.

But this is all at the same time as journalists are being asked to create more and more content for a rapidly increasing number of platforms and output. A need to fill the ever increasingly hungry media beast.

So what is the solution. Blogburst! Or at least services similar to Blogburst anyway.

What’s Blogburst? It’s basically a service that provides blogger created articles to traditional media websites. Companies like Reuters and the Chigaco Sun Times pull in blog posts to their own templates.

This gives those companies extra material for their website and I’m sure eventually, or for the higher profile bloggers already – for their newspapers and magazines.

It’s a way of 1) using the mass of often very good content being created by bloggers and giving it a much wider circulation, 2) filling the increasing mass of space available for content without pushing journalists even further and hopefully 3) providing a source of revenue for the bloggers getting circulated the most.

So far three of my blog posts have been circulated by Blogburst – to Reuters and the Chicago Sun Times. The Reuters articles have had more than 13 thousand views between them and the Chicago Sun Times posts have had more than three thousand since the start of 2008.

You can read my HD-DVD v Blu-Ray article and the Cow photo article in the Reuters template.

I’ve made no money from these and don’t think the articles are nearly good enough to have made money and am slightly surprised those posts HAVE been syndicated but it was a rush to see them on Reuters and the Chicago Sun Times – I’m used to seeing my words on BBC website templates but it was a new thrill to see them there as well.