For this assignment, I was asked to discuss various topics concerning modern-day journalism in response to a meeting we had with a radio host from the CBC here in New Brunswick, Terry Seguin. I was absent from school on that day, and so I did not have the privilege of listening to the experienced journalist speak. However, I will try my best to present my views on similar topics that were discussed in that meeting from that day, to the best of my ability.
Topic #3: Churnalism
Churnalism is the art of creating news stories based on older articles from other sources and is done by the writers to meet the demands of producing (or churning out) news on a regular basis. After I learned about churnalism, I came to the conclusion that originality in the world of Journalism is indeed something that is hard to find now-a-days.
Although there are some purely original news stories out there, it is almost certain that they will soon generate some sort of churnalism offspring. And even of these original stories, some of them are not entirely composed of information gathered from personal investigation by the writers and reporters, and are in a way half-breeds, containing a certain percentage of primary news sources and a certain percentage of secondary and tertiary news sources that have been taken from other news articles.
Do I feel that these stories are fake? No, they do contain, to some extent, factual information. Yet, I would be more cautious if I were to know just how many times a news story has been reproduced and changed by the writers own personal input each time, before reaching my ears. Hmm, when you think about it, it is kind of like a game of "telephone" where the more times a sentence or phrase is reproduced, the more unreliable or fake the statement becomes.
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