Go explore churnalism

Since churnalism.com launched on 23^rd February a lot of people have asked us if they could ‘search the other way’. In other words, could they see news articles that appeared to be based on press releases rather than vice versa.

We now have enough press releases in the system to make that worthwhile. So today we’re launching an ‘Explore’ page. Here you can see all the news articles that appear to based on press releases loaded into our system (over 5,000 so far). You can filter by press release source – such as the government’s news distribution service, Sainsbury’s or Eurekalert (science releases). And, you can filter by news outlet (UK nationals, BBC news online and Sky).

Go to churnalism.com ‘Explore’ page

This reveals things like the:

• 24 BBC News articles since November 2010 that appear to be based on BBC press releases
• 221 MailOnline articles since March 2009 that appear to be based on OnePoll surveys
• 84 Guardian articles since early 2010 appear to be based on Central Office of Information releases
• 32 Telegraph articles since 2007 appear to be based on press releases from Marks and Spencers
• 31 Financial Times articles since January 2010 appear to be based on CBI press releases

Our system tracks back most national news articles for about three years. Press releases are, necessarily, still more sporadic since they rely on people uploading and on a select handful of popular press release sources.

We will be adding more press release sources as fast as we can. In the meantime, if you’d like to help you can:

• Tell us where we can find good sources of press releases online
• Help us write scrapers (if you’re feeling really techie). We’ve put up a short ‘how to’ guide here. If you have any issues please do drop us an email (team AT journalisted DOT com)

Any pages you find when exploring churnalism.com you can share with a shortened url via twitter or Facebook or elsewhere.