Who wouldn't want to put her in the stocks? credit: Flickr/celebrityvillage
Would you like to see Jordan in the stocks? Is Paris Hilton or Jonathan Ross more likely to give you a headache? How many facts do you know about Russell Crowe, star of the New Robin Hood movie?
On the surface these stories I ‘wrote’ for the Mirror.co.uk are light bits of celebrity fluff but beneath their starry surface there is something a little more sinister. The survey on which celebrity ‘the public’ would like ot see shoved in the medieval stocks was actually carried out by a company that runs castle a company who just happened to be holding a medieval themed event that weekend. The scientific polling process? Getting their staff to ask some people.
The headache piece tells a familiar tale. Carried out by Nurofen, a popular brand of ibuprofen you don’t have to be Einstein to work out the none to subtle message. If you have a headache – Paris Hilton induced or otherwise – ‘survey says’ you should probably take Nurofen over other painkillers. In fact Philip Davies, Senior Brand Manager of Nurofen supplied a helpful quote to hammer home this message (which funnily enough I did not use in the final article) he said: “Those looking for a painkiller and reaching for a paracetamol to relieve their headache could be making an error of judgement. Targeting headaches with Nurofen* is shown to provide faster and longer relief from headaches than standard paracetamol tablets.” Good to know huh?
For me as a journalism student some of this churnalism was a helpful excercise – teaching me to turn around a boring press release into a sharp, tight article at top speed in unfamiliar tabloid prose. But for the readers it’s not quite such a sweet deal. In fact I struggle to see the value in telling people that some people who were wondering around a castle one day would quite like to put Jordon in the stocks. Of course they would. She’s annoying. But does that fact in itself have enough journalistic merit to give a cheeky plug for a random medieval castle?
But there is a reason for this type of press release re-release – it provides brilliant SEO for the website and means that traffic flocks there from far and wide. It’s not about lazy journalism but more about sheer amounts of journalism. Journalists are creating a huge amount more content everyday for the web and the paper simultaneously. People, it seems, want to read about Paris Hilton, about Jonathan Ross, about Jordan or Cheryl or Ashley Cole, about Lindsay Lohan and Victoria Beckham and as long as these name draw traffic churnalising journalists will put them on their pages. And so, in the case of this post, will I.
Rag Doll 