Reading Sources — Press Release, Wire Service, Original Paper

There is a common mental model of how journalism works: a journalist identifies a story, investigates it, interviews sources, and writes it up. This model is accurate for some journalism — long-form investigations, political reporting by experienced correspondents, documentary work. It describes a significant proportion of what appears in quality newspapers as original reporting.

It is not an accurate description of how most news content is produced on most days.

In his 2008 book Flat Earth News, the investigative journalist Nick Davies commissioned a systematic research study of the origins of news stories in the UK national press. The Cardiff University team examined 2,000 stories published in The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, and in some cases The Daily Mail. They found that only 12% of stories were demonstrably based on material generated by the publication's own reporters. The remaining 88% was based — wholly or in part — on second-hand material: wire agency copy (particularly from the Press Association), public relations material, press releases, or other pre-existing content (Davies, 2008, p. 52).

Davies coined the term 'churnalism' to describe the practice of processing this material — rewriting, repackaging, and publishing — without the checks, verification, and additional reporting that distinguish journalism from content production. The term was deliberately provocative, but the Cardiff data gave it empirical grounding.

This was not a study of tabloids or disreputable outlets. It was a study of the UK's most prestigious national newspapers. And it described a structural reality rather than a failure of individual journalists: the economics of news production had reduced the time and resources available for original reporting, making the recycling of pre-produced material not an aberration but the norm.

Why this matters for readers

If most news stories begin as press releases or wire copy rather than original reporting, then the characteristics of those source documents — their framing, their selective emphasis, their omissions — propagate into the journalism that readers eventually see. A press release that describes a company's new product in favourable terms, or that frames a research finding in a particular way, or that emphasises certain facts and buries others, will tend to produce journalism that reflects those choices — not because journalists are lazy or dishonest, but because they are working under conditions that allow limited time for independent verification.

Understanding this is the starting point for reading any news story with appropriate intelligence: asking not just 'what does this story say?' but 'where did this story come from, and what might have been lost or changed in getting here?'