churnalism

The NAUGHTIES: Splat’s bad journalism awards night | News.com.au Splat! Blog by Evan Maloney
Monday, September 01, 2008 at 03:16am

As well as writing this blog I have several other jobs. Sometimes I am able to spend a few hours writing and researching one post and other times I find an hour, or a few minutes between jobs or before bed, to sit down and churn out a post. It can be sometimes extremely dissatisfying (but I’ll live) to put my name to posts that have been splattered out at 1 a.m. just before I go to bed, after sixteen hours writing all day on something a little less haphazard.

Over the weekend I thought there might be a way that I could reclaim all the ordinary articles that I write, in the same way Italians reclaimed the “wog” word in the early 90’s.

I have an idea for a journalism awards evening which I’d like to propose to you.

Watch out Razzies, here come The Naughties

Nick Davies, the award winning British journalist who was recently in Australia, spoke on Four Corners last week about how so many journalists today are writing utter crud, or “churnalism” as he calls it.

“I use this word “churnalism” instead of journalism. They just churn this stuff over without having the time to check it, without having the time to decide whether or not this is what they should even be covering today. And it flows into the news and a lot of it is garbage.”

I read this and I thought, “he’s absolutely right. Why aren’t the churnalists being recognised for their work? Why should all the awards go to well researched, well written and insightful pieces? Why can’t we award the crud as well? Hollywood has The Razzies, why don’t we have something like that?”

And then it hit me, in the week leading up to the Walkleys at Crown Casino, we need an alternative award ceremony acknowledging the half-arsed contributions made by hopelessly overworked or inept journalists everywhere.

I thought we could call them The NAUGHTIES: The Newspaper Awards for Utter Garbage, Hogwash, Tripe and Irredeemable Editorial Style.

So here’s what I was thinking I’ll do, in no particular order apart from #8:

1. Try to get a few computer companies, maybe BlackBerry, Google and etc. to sponsor the awards (eh-hem, and my flight back to Australia to host them, of course, because Poland is freezing in late November). Computer companies are fitting sponsors because, really, it is thanks to the Internet that so many half-rate journos such as myself get to churn out the crap every day for a few bucks. The trophies for each categories will be gold plated Keyboards and a gold-plated pen with the engraving:

Congratulations, you’re a very NAUGHTY boy/girl