After the Tracker reported on Feb. 14 that The Washington Post was running press releases in its Health & Science section and the paper stopped doing it, the Columbia Journalism Review now argues that the Post's own reporting would likely be no better.
In a piece this morning in The Observatory, CJR's science section, Alexis Sobel Fitts writes that the press releases lack outside sources and "read, quite clearly, like press releases." But "it’s unclear that the in-house study coverage likely to replace it—the kind of quick articles which are often based entirely on the press release—are significantly better than the Post just printing a labeled press release."
She continues: "In many ways the Post’s system is more ethical, informing the reader that they are reading something curated by the study’s authors, rather than misleading readers into believing they are reading objectively reported coverage when they are really reading a press release, quickly rewritten into prettier language by a journalist."
And the reason the Post will rely on quick rewrites? "Writing well reported coverage studies [sic] takes time, often a resource that’s not possible on the kinds of deadlines allotted for a quick news piece," Fitts writes.
Fitts correctly points out that too many health and science stories are based on a single source, or a single press release. And even when a story is competently reported, "health journalism relying on a single study tells us very little," she writes. That's true, but it shouldn't be an argument for not doing them–it should be an argument for doing them correctly. And it certainly is not an argument for running press releases.
Happily, in the case of the Post, we do not have to guess what the it might do if it stopped reprinting press releases. We can take a look at this week's Health & Science section, which was the first to appear since the Post announced it would no longer run press releases. Did it replace them with shoddy rewrites, as Fitts thought likely?
It did not. Instead, it published a story from New Scientist on the use of genome mapping to discover a girl's rare illness; one from the Los Angeles Times on how ants respond to floods; and a piece from Science News about pack rats. All of these are superior to the press releases the Post was plucking from the press-distribution site Eurekalert, and we can guess that publishing them did not require significantly more staff time than it took to publish the releases.
In my original post, I suggested that the Washington Post should rely more heavily on the AP, for example, rather than running press releases. Fitts doesn't like that idea, either. "Even the AP's health coverage is a mixed bag," she writes. That's true; not every story is a winner. But the Post can pick and choose from the AP's offerings as easily as it can browse through press releases. And it's clear from this week's section that it also has access to high-quality journalism from New Scientist, Science News, the Los Angeles Times, and possibly others.
The Post was correct to dispense with the reprinting of press releases. Fitts's argument to the contrary misunderstands the fundamental nature of a press release, which is to promote the institution that prepared it. Press releases are not "curated by the study's authors," as Fitts writes, but by the administrators and spokespeople of the institutions that write them.
Fitts wants to excuse the use of press releases on the grounds that there is a lot of bad journalism out there. Part of the reason for that is that tight news budgets have prompted many news outlets to buy out or lay off reporters with expertise in science and medicine. But reprinting press releases is not the solution. It can only make the situation worse.
-Paul Raeburn
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