Nick Davies’ book ‘Flat Earth News’ is providing an interesting read. Not only as a student studying journalism, but also as a person who reads newspapers.

And considering the main story on ‘The Sun’ website, it’s hard to suggest otherwise that British news is more related to ‘churnalism’ than ‘journalism’.

 ’Man Pregnant’ is more Daily Sport than the Sun, but remember, this is a paper that once printed ‘Freddie Starr ate my Hamster’.

Indeed, that was not a true story, but more a marvellous piece of PR by Max Clifford, to help Freddie promote his tour (which went on to sell out across the country.)

Reading more into the ‘Man Pregnant’ story, my mind was switching to the idea of ‘churnalism’.

Whilst reading Davies’ book, I didn’t actually want to believe him. The work of the great journalists in the world today, is that churnalism?

Having finished reading the website, I flick onto my local rag the ‘Reading Evening Post’ website, and everything I feared becomes true.

Week after week, the Post produces a rag with no real news. Viewing the comments on their news stories, it seems like the residents of Reading agree.

Milicent Davis is a prolific commenter, mainly along the lines of ‘have you got any real news today?’, ‘Shock horror: evening post in real news shocker’. And to be fair, he’s got a point.

The Scrote, as is refered to by certain sections of the borough, has become nothing more than the councils mouth piece.

Their biggest piece of churnalism, is allowing the Green Party to run a piece about how one of their men is living, while only creating one bin full of waste.

But they haven’t only been able to get that as a main feature, the same man who is hoping to create one bin of waste, has also lived in a tent in a car park for a week, to show we can all live at zero carbon-footprint.

Nothing made me want to run the bath every day, fill the kettle up to full for just one cup than having to read and see the beardy-weirdy, Worzel on the front page of a paper.

I had wondered why on earth the Post went for this story. And unfortunately, Davies provided the answer. It’s ‘churnalism’ at its very best, they provide the story, and the Post put it out for all to see.

And that would be it. On local newsroom, with staff struggling to output copy, ‘churnalism’ runs wild.

Instead, today, ‘churnalism’ is advent on the front page of national news. It was betraying to everything that is journalism. Everything that I have studied. Everything that I believed.

I’ll defend journalism to the high-hill with anyone, but today is a dark-dark day. Today, there is no news worthy of being on the front page.

It might as well have been blank.