The Press Release as News: Troubling Trends on the Digital Front
by Mike Martin
St. Louis Journalism Review, February 2003

The boundless nature of digital information has troubled the recording industry for several years and may pose new and perhaps equally troubling developments for journalism.

Unfettered by the traditional barriers journalists impose on headlines with typesetting, paper, and
editorial decisions, public information officers now routinely post press releases as bona fide "news" at many popular and widely read Internet news outlets. This practice is particularly widespread in
science journalism, where institutional press releases that simplify complex scientific milestones frequently dictate the headlines.

Value Added News

"Journalists will have to add a great deal more value to the news they report in this environment," asserts Roger Johnson, CEO of Charlottesville, Virginia-based online news service Newswise.
"Reporters will no longer be able to simply regurgitate or rewrite the press releases that catch their fancy, something they are able to do regularly in print media."

Johnson has introduced the "Newswise News Service" with the stated goal of eliminating journalistic intermediaries by expanding "the distribution of your research news beyond traditional media outlets to
leading news portals, medical and health care websites, news databases, policy makers, and news-attentive audiences." The term "your research news" is synonymous with "your press release" and for a
fee Johnson's firm will cast a press release into a format indistinguishable from a traditional newswire story.

By facilitating, as Johnson says, "the delivery of your news directly to certain interested publics" and bypassing traditional reporters, Newswise assumes the role of surrogate journalist.

Johnson's team transforms a press release into a news story by deleting the characteristic PR tags. "We remove sources' contact information from publicly accessed news and provide it in the format
of a traditional news service story as opposed to a news release," Johnson tells prospective clients. Newswise also edits and reformats press releases to "meet the standards of any stylebook," standards the
reading public identifies with reportage.

Press or PR?

Newswise is hardly alone in the enterprise of converting university press releases to headline news. Yahoo! News, the Internet's premiere news portal, lists ScienceDaily.com and UniSci.com -- popular sites that exclusively feature reformatted press releases -- with ABC, BBC, USA Today, MSNBC, NOVA, and National Geographic.

Potomac, Maryland-based Science Daily bills itself as "one of the Internet's leading online magazines and Web portals devoted to science, technology, and medicine that brings you breaking news about the latest discoveries and hottest research projects in everything from astrophysics to zoology." At Science
Daily, public relations officers dictate the headlines because breaking news comes exclusively from "news releases submitted by leading universities and other research organizations around the world," according to editors Dan and Michele Hogan.

Cape Coral, Florida-based UniScience News Net, or UniSci, may be misleading readers by billing itself as "Your Independent Source Of Daily Science News." UniSci depends on press and public relations
officers to supply a daily stream of releases that editors Don Radler and Paul Haisman byline under certain conditions.

"When a release stands on its own feet and needs no major editing or amplification by our editorial staff, the writer deserves recognition, so we run it with a byline," Radler informs site visitors. "UniSci
considers releases from all sources --universities, research labs, individual companies and PR firms -- on their merits," Radler notes.

They do not, however, consider stories from wire services or traditional media.

UniSci's stated editorial policies may strike journalists as vague and possibly capricious. Press releases submitted to UniSci "may be bylined and used virtually as is" though "most Cape Coral, Florida
releases will be lightly or heavily edited or rewritten and may be combined with other material in a larger story." Radler's sole criterion for editorial input is the "quality of the science writing" by the press officer.

Probing and Prodding

Science journalists, on the other hand, consider several issues before issuing reports based on releases. They often solicit opinions from multiple third-party experts to assess the quality of the research, especially if it has not been accepted for publication by a legitimate, peer-reviewed journal.

Editors combing press releases for assignments also consider the reputations of the scientists and
institutions behind the reports. Finally, freelance and staff journalists receive their compensation from media outlets that maintain an arms length relationship with sources and advertisers, presumably to reduce bias and report stories based on criteria of newsworthiness alone.

Contemporary journalists face an evolving pattern of news delivery that may have a surprising consequence: futuristic digital media, with its open borders, may reincarnate the probing, prodding, muckraking news hound more typical of typewriters and the Watergate era than CNN.com and the Internet. With the uncensored, unedited ability to post so-called "knowledge based news" over modems and email directly to major Internet portals, public information officers and press agents will evolve into a new type of institutionally-biased journalists.

Digital delivery will indeed force traditional reporters to "add value" to their stories, but not by competing with services that reformat press releases. Journalists of the digital age will return to labor-intensive beats characterized by reticent, inaccessible, and often difficult sources. Reporters -- not PR "flacks" -- will break the kind of stories that made the careers of such journalistic giants as Woodward and Bernstein, Jacob Riis, and Upton Sinclair.

Pay to Play

Press releases that masquerade as unbiased news pose a quandary for reporters and the reading public. In the short term -- until reporters pursue real breaking news in the field, leaving telephone, fax, and email in the office -- the subtle boundaries that separate public relations and headlines will further blur. Internet news "services" will continue to chip away at the wall between editorial and sales, as press agents pay to post releases in formats that make them indistinguishable from bona fide reportage to the general public.

Dominated as it is by the hallmarks of knowledge-based news -- public information officers, embargoed stories, and pay-to-post Internet portals such as Ascribe and Eurekalert -- science journalism may
suffer for a time from a proliferation of "junk science" from news of questionable repute and biased origin. Celebrity, business, and entertainment reporting is certain to follow the same route, as traditional PR wire services such as Business Wire and PR Newswire find a powerful new source of revenue in bypassing journalists.

The long-term outlook for journalism -- a profession that has ceded too much of its prestige and control to the public relations industry -- remains positive, but only so long as going forward means going back -- to the principles that make stories worth reporting with the coveted headline "news."