Inside Churnalism

Abstract

There is widespread concern about the growing tide of “churnalism” in the news. Commonly, such accounts are written from within and about journalism studies. But this overlooks another story that we examine in this paper: that of the public relations (PR) practitioner. Based on interviews with 28 UK PR practitioners, we document their media relations practices, their perspectives on power relations with journalists, and their normative evaluations of churnalism. We find a number of PR professionals who understand news in depth, and whose media relations practice goes beyond the classic information subsidy, to what we call an editorial subsidy: targeted, tailored, page-ready news copy that contains key client messages. PR practitioners see power relationships in complex and contradictory ways, though. Despite many circumstances working in their favour, this does not mean they necessary feel emboldened in their everyday encounters with journalists. Finally, and perhaps surprisingly, for the vast majority of practitioners, there were either professional or personal concerns about increasing churnalism. At least on the surface, very few observe journalists' recent travails with glee: most want to see a robust and independent journalism where PR input is balanced with other sources.

KEYWORDS:

• agenda building
• churnalism
• interviews
• journalistic independence
• media relations
• power
• public relations
• PR-isation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors were fortunate to work with a brilliant BA Politics and Media student at Bournemouth University, Alison Smith, who was the Research Assistant for this project. We wish to extend our thanks for her contributions. We also would like to thank all of the 28 PR practitioners who were so generous with their time when participating in the interviews.

Notes

1. It is worth noting that while the process for researching churnalism in the news was complicated enough already (see Reich 2010; Van Leuven, Deprez, and Raeymaeckers 2013), this finding would suggest that tracing the roots of PR in the news might be even more difficult in the future.