Some PR firms conduct surveys that they use to write news articles. These survey articles, often modified and reprinted in newspapers, are little more than advertisements masquerading as news. 

 

As these dubious articles undermine and distort the idea of journalism, my idea in this project was to undermine and distort the PR survey stories that run in newspapers. I selected seven of these survey articles from various UK newspapers and compared the similarities in the newspapers’ stories to the text of the original PR stories.

I then ran the newspapers’ version of the stories through a text-distorting program I wrote in Processing. I printed the results in a newspaper as a critique. The percentage of characters that are distorted in my newspaper is equivalent to the percent of the story that the newspaper directly copied from the original PR source.