Churnalism.com: The Platform That Exposes Copy-and-Paste Journalism

The plague of “copy and paste” and “plagiarism” is becoming increasingly widespread among last-minute writers and even some newspapers. In the United Kingdom, however, this might soon come to an end. In order to give journalism what belongs to journalism—quality and uniqueness—the websiteChurnalism.com, has been created; a site where you can “catch” unoriginal authors who pass off others’ content as their own. The service, currently only active in Great Britain (although its creators plan to expand it to other countries soon), is named Churnalism (a term coined by journalist Nick Davies from The Guardian), with the intention of twisting the word journalism. Churnalism.com compares parts of the text entered by the user with more than three million articles in its database.

The results are often astonishing—thanks to this service, well-known reporters can be exposed and it is discovered (in some cases) that articles published by prestigious press outlets are in fact the result of “copied and pasted” press releases. The phenomenon of plagiarism has neither color nor boundaries. I am sure that such a service could also succeed here in Italy, where, besides the thousands of sites that aggregate anything and everything, you sometimes find wire stories copied and pasted even on the most prominent newspapers whose state funding is their main source of revenue.

Not to mention those sites that publish press releases daily and then try to pass them off as quality content at industry workshops or events. After all, putting a signature under an article costs nothing. It hardly matters if the copy-paster who puts their name next to a corporate press release published on dozens of other sites is the real author of the content. After all, no DNA test has yet been invented for text authors, and serial copy-pasters know this very well.

While waiting for the smoking gun to arrive in Italy, so we can clean the web of content we could do without, I welcome this initiative and hope it can serve as a warning to those who want to become journalists by feeding off the work of others.