Boing Boing<\/a> points us to a recent study in Australia that looked at a week’s worth of newspaper stories, and found that more than half were placed by PR people<\/a>, though there was definitely a pretty wide range depending on the newspaper.<\/p>\n This seems like a pretty important finding to be included in any debate about “saving” newspapers — especially when the government is talking about stepping in to tax others<\/a> to prop up newspapers. If all they’re really doing is propping up efforts to run wire copy and run thinly veiled advertisements-as-news, is that really what the government should be supporting? It seems we have this mental “ideal” of journalism, represented by Woodward and Bernstein, holding politicians accountable for their actions — but that rarely happens in practice. Instead, too much of traditional journalism has become notetaking — writing down what politicians and PR people say and repeating it back to an audience that could find that information themselves if they wanted it.<\/p>\n Permalink<\/a> | Comments<\/a> | Email This Story<\/a> We get pitched stories from PR people all the time, and probably 99.9% of them end up getting ignored and trashed — mostly because they’re not even close to relevant, but often because we have no interest in being someone’s free promotional team. What’s amusing, however, is that invariably, days after we get pitched on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435998","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435998","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435998"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435998\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435998"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435998"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435998"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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