Churnalism.com is an independent, non-profit website built by the Media Standards Trust to help the public distinguish between original journalism and ‘churnalism’.

What is ‘churnalism’?

‘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.
The site compresses all articles published on national newspaper websites, on BBC news, and Sky news online, into a series of numbers based on 15 character strings (using a hash function) and then stores them in a fast access database. When someone pastes in some text and clicks ‘compare’, the churn engine compresses the text entered and then searches for similar compressions (or ‘common hashes’). If the engine finds any articles where the similarity is greater than 20%, then it suggests the article may be churn.

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And yes – I realise the irony in churning this out from their FAQ

Check it out……

Britain at risk of another financial crisis, Bank of England chief warns….

Oi, Prole, bend over..

Mervyn King says that “imbalances” in the banking system remain and are “beginning to grow again”.

Mr King urges high street banks to take a better, longer term view towards their customers and to stop focusing on the need to “simply maximise profits next week”.

He accuses them of routinely exploiting their millions of customers. “If it’s possible [for financial services firms] to make money out of gullible or unsuspecting customers, particularly institutional customers, [they think] that is perfectly acceptable,” he says.

The Governor criticises the “weight put on the importance and value of takeovers” and raises concerns that companies with good reputations have been “destroyed” in the search for short-term profits.

Mr King expresses regret for not sounding a louder warning over his concerns before the last banking crisis.

Telegraph Article here (and cf a Guardian article here from the ‘Bail Out’)

“One of the things that make the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions potentially important on a global scale is that they took place in states that were already neoliberalised. The complete failure of neoliberalsm to deliver “human well-being” to a large majority of Egyptians was one of the prime causes of the revolution, at least in the sense of helping to prime millions of people who were not connected to social media to enter the streets on the side of the pro-democracy activists.”

Al Jazeera Article here

Screws Fall Out All The Time….   The World Is An Imperfect Place

Steal my Wardrobe?

Andrew Clifford Capener: The A-1 Scrabble designer edition

The A-1 Scrabble designer edition. The purpose of this project was to revive an old, but loved game: Scrabble. The idea was to excite people about typograqphy by giving them the ability to choose what font their scrabble set would come in. The set would come in the font of your choice or with an assorted font pack. The scrabble board and interior box are made out of solid walnut, and the exterior box is made from birch. Each of the 6 board pieces is magnetized to fit together perfectly and each piece slides nicely into its respective slot in the box and is secured by interior magnets as well. The interior of the exterior box as well as the bottoms of the 6 board pieces are lined with cork, to protect them while in use.

more here

I’ve reappropriated the zerof8 domain with the intention of posting all manner of things here that are mostly nothing to do with any of my other sites.  Hopefully.