14 Aug 2010

Journalism Warning Labels

All people with an interest in PR and media will find these interesting. This is the type of content that I normally share on Posterous, but I liked these labels so much that I reposted it here.

A sheet of stickers.

Statistics, survey results and/or equations in this article were sponsored by a PR company.

This article is basically just a press release, copied and pasted.

Medical claims in this article have not been confirmed by peer-reviewed research.

This article is based on an unverified, anonymous tipoff.

This sticker's mainly for celebrity articles: Starsuckers did a good job of showing just how little verification is frequently done.

To meet a deadline, this article was plagiarised from another news source.

This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia.

...and we all know what happens when you do this.

Journalist does not understand the subject they are writing about.

Journalist hiding their own opinions by using phrases like 'some people claim'.

To ensure future interviews with subject, important questions were not asked.

Includes content written by Richard Littlejohn.

via tomscott.com