A story in the Guardian reports on a website called Churnalism.com which compares the text from press releases with news stories on the same topic. This text-matching exercise has shown that news organizations often copy the wording from press releases and paste it into their stories.
The phenomenon of journalists relying on press releases isn't a new one, but it is one which will presumably become more widespread as news organizations around the world respond to harsh economic realities by cutting reporting budgets.
This story (rightly) addresses the recycling of press releases as a question related to quality in journalism, but doesn't mention the p-word, and there's a sense in which it shouldn't, in which plagiarism would be a side issue in this context. The people who write press releases would like nothing better than for newspapers to reprint them as fact, with no changes made. They don't feel their authorial rights have been infringed. The reason this strategy can be problematic is that we assume press releases are designed to tell the story in such a way as to put the issuer of the release in the most favorable light possible, while we hope the news media take a more balanced and critical view of any news event they report on.
However, if it were students instead of journalists using this strategy, the first reaction of many teachers would be to the unattributed textual relationships, and the word 'plagiarism' would be invoked. (And, interestingly, the information about a given news story on the Churnalism site is strikingly reminiscent of a Turnitin report--percentage of the press release copied into the story, percentage of the story consisting of language from the press release, a side-by-side comparison of the two texts, etc.)
So this story interests me for what it implies about the relationship between what we teach our students, and the writing they'll do in the workplace. The principles we teach for good source use are fundamentally academic ones, but few of our students are going to be academics. They may go on to work in professional contexts where the recycling of language per se is not always problematic, and in which the principles guiding acceptable and unacceptable intertextuality are shaped by the individual demands of the discourse community.
To what extent does our teaching about source use in the university equip students to write in their professional lives?
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