Today I had the pleasure of being in a lecture given by Guest speaker Henry Makiwa: his topic was the sometimes difficult relationship between journalists and NGOs/charities.

Henry is a Senior Media Relations officer at British Red Cross, before his employment with the Red Cross he was a journalist and is therefor more then qualified to look at the relationship from both sides.

During the talk he shared with us some of his responsibilities inside the charitable organization which included writing stories and featured on current crisis, events and situations dealt with by British Red Cross. Content which is sent to news publications throughout the United Kingdom and then published by the media in question.

This approach means that with minimal effort publications can give their readers the chance to hear what is happening for the Red Cross without having to research the stories themselves. On the one hand this can be presented as a positive thing because it gives publications quick content from a seemingly reliable source.

However this new discovery raised serious questions for me about the reliability of news sourced in this way. For years the journalist has been presented with press releases using their skill to extract the most important parts for transformation into a story. This new practice changes the existing relationship entirely, literally cutting out the middle man: the journalist.

The feature is replicated exactly, as if dictating to the journalist what they should print within their publication: a story told their way. How can a story be unbiased when told entirely in the way of an organizations choosing, charitable or otherwise?

These stories are ‘Churnalism’ which is a news article that is published as journalism that is really just a press release without many alterations made. In his book Nick Davies book Flat Earth News explains how churnalism is created ‘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’ (Davies, 2009: 59).

Does our trust of charities obscure our judgement as journalists, leaving us as simply a mouth piece to their mantra and what does this new relationship between PR and journalists say for the future of journalism. It seems that pre written feature stories like this are being used increasingly coming from the PR departments of all different companies.

The lines between journalism and PR are being blurred leaving us subject to the whims of organizations as they dictate to us what we should write about them, from their own perspective. This line that separates the two fields of PR and journalism is closing in on us with the changing times, even Henry as part of a charitable organization has found himself having to move with the times and jump into social media.

Its easy to say that the pressure of the social media revolution makes producing fast and easy news like this high, but that feels like a bit of a cop out. Or that with a tight budget at many media houses this instant journalism is an answer to financial woes, but that feels like a cop out to me as well. It is still possible to write innovative and precise journalism on a quick time frame without having it pre produced for you and their are many budding and talented journalists that will write for experience.

As well as the pre produced features and news the British Red Cross also take organisations like the Sun on trips to parts of the world they are dealing with crisis or fundraising for. Though it makes you wonder if in this practice they show a side to the situation appealing to their personal aims: why wonder when you can ask.

Henry explained that they do not fund the trips but merely facilitate them though his explanation as to how they plan where to go did not ease the unsettling feeling that they are heavily influencing the stories that come out of those trips.

All in all I learnt about a whole new side to news production, where high profile organizations like the Guardian simply signing their names under the British Red Crosses feature stories and presenting them to the world as news: which presented me with new queries on new journalism.

References

Davies, N. (2009). Flat earth news. Trafalgar/Mar.