"Churnalism" is a term for the practice of journalists publishing press releases verbatim, or almost verbatim, rather than writing original copy. A few years ago, UK organization Media Standards Trust created an online tool, churnalism.com, that allows users to compare text to a database of articles from UK national newspapers, the BBC, and so on, to see whether or not those media outlets are simply copying and pasting. Great for consumers of UK media, but churnalism is a global problem. Thanks to a collaboration between the Sunlight Foundation and the Media Standards Trust, consumers of US news now have a similar resource, Churnalism US.

The developers at Sunlight have created a database of press releases from clearing houses like EurekAlert and MarketWire as well as from RSS feeds that capture PR from Fortune 500 companies, important non-profits and think tanks, trade organizations, Congressional offices, and also Wikipedia. Users can enter URLs or pasted text into Churnalism (or install a browser extension) at which point the text of the article is hashed and compared to the database for matches. By using sliding windows of hashes, SuperFastMatch (yes, that name is awesome) lets Churnalism US narrow down rapidly on possible matches, at which point the front end takes over and analyzes the similarities. Does the news post have the same quote? Are there giant blocks of identical text? And so on. In addition to identifying straight copy-paste jobs, Churnalism US should also be able to highlight cases where quotes have been selectively edited or used without context.

Sunlight’s goal with Churnalism US is to let us track the influence of ideas throughout the media, and the approach the US tool takes seems a little more intuitive and user-friendly than the UK version, which compares user-entered press releases to a database of news articles. But by including EurekAlert in its database, Sunlight also created a tool that will help draw more attention to the churnalism that seems to be endemic in science writing, where you’re more likely than ever to come across a barely altered press release masquerading as science journalism. It was this problem that actually inspired me to start writing Science.Ars back in 2004, where I took what seemed to be a novel step in only writing about something once I’d read the actual paper, a practice we continue to this day (and one that others, such as the research blogging movement, have also adopted).

What the tool probably won’t help with is another plague affecting online journalism wherein sites simply claim others’ original work as their own. Sometimes this is done with an agenda in mind, as in the recent case of Anil Potti and his attempts at reputation management following what appears to be extensive research fraud. But often it’s just unscrupulous content thieves looking to get some pageviews off the sweat of someone else’s brow.