1. Objective Journalism or Copy-Pasted Press Releases: A Preliminary Media Content Analysis Siniša Bosanac sbosanac@ffzg.hr Bojana Mandić bmandic@ffzg.hr Andrija Sprčić andrija.sprcic@gmail.com Department of Information Sciences Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Ivana Lučića 3, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia INFuture 2009: “Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing”

3. What are we reading? “Do they really have enough time for investigative journalism and what is the quality of articles we are reading? Is the source most of the time the same, or do they contain objective observations?

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6. Similar research 1985 - “Public relations determine journalism” by Barbara Bearns 2007 - “In most cases journalist believe and publish information without investigating it a little bit further” by Julije Katančević

7. Protection of Intellectual property Croatian Copyright Law – “Author's work is an original intellectual creation in literary, scientific and artistic fields, which has individual character, regardless of the manner and form of expression, type, value or purpose”. – official government texts such as laws, regulations, logs, court decisions, standards, daily news and other news that can be recognized as regular media information.

8. General posture The principle posture agreed upon by the journalists is not to copy but the reality differs

9. Journalist opinions it is acceptable for a journalist to copy certain formulations from a press release if there aren’t hidden ads behind it brief news announcement or if there is limited space available for publishing the information in the publication relaying the announcements from the police, court or state’s attorney, or those received minutes before broadcasting an informative program

10. PR managers opinion PR managers and their clients would be much happier to get dozens of different articles regarding their company than ten articles that are verbatim copies of the same text.

11. Methods recognizing two types of plagiarism – Select All / Ctrl+C / Ctrl+V Verbatim copy (also known as the “copy - paste”) Easy to spot – Paraphrasing harder to detect requires close reading

12. Data Collection set of documents which are suspected to contain plagiarized material (derived documents) – media articles set of documents for which is suspected that the plagiarized material originated from (source documents) – press releases

13. Data Collection We monitored the selected articles in a period of one year (July 2008 – July 2009) Converting the material in PDF format to a more editable format by using the ABBY Fine Reader OCRSoftware 217 media articles and 26 press releases Average lenght of document – 400 words

14. Paring of documents Three steps: – Comparing the publication dates – Pairing the documents according to titles – Pairing the documents according to press releases Out of 217 articles – 131 articles linked with press releases (5.03 articles per release) In order to show more reliable results, only four pairs of documents that had source – derived document ratio higher than 10 were selected for an in-depth analysis.

15. Analysis a sample of four source documents, and 60 derived documents. Comparison: – Compare documents feature in Microsoft Word 2007 – Manual correction – Close reading

16. Percentage of copied content according to type of publication

17. Percentage of copied content according to size of articles

18. Interpretation of results / PR Manager – Journalist symbiosis

19. Conclusion lack of public relations managers would cause information gaps – Petra Dorsch developing adequate tools that would enable the comparison of a much higher volume of articles as one of the methods of quality control in journalism