Photo: allispossible.org.uk

An explanation from the online editorial team

We like to explain our work, which is sometimes difficult for laypeople to understand. We do this in the style of RTL.lu and their explanations of why they are forced to post accident photos online because of a dead child lying on a beach. Here is a LINK.

Press releases-Copy-Paste: Why? We are regularly asked why we simply copy press releases from the government, parties, clubs or companies and, ideally, even upload them as PDFs to our site and link to them there. We also do this with Questions Parlementaires and every time a topical petition has been submitted that could reach the media. We are also asked why we do not at least indicate that these contributions are not regular articles.

Such questions often come from people who are concerned that we are simply doing public service for political or commercial actors, or rather „journalism“. What many people do not understand is that in these times all media work is public service. The internet has destroyed the role of journalism as a „gatekeeper“. The press used to control what information it included in the public debate. But people could now theoretically get information from anywhere, including directly from the source itself, and who would then watch the beautiful advertisements on our site that we use to make our money? RTL1 could of course now also try to provide journalistic added value to every source, but we lack the time and desire for that.

Why do we systematically neglect the contextualization and background questions of press releases?

The general public has a right to know something. However, there is no right to context, no right to have information evaluated, arranged or contrasted. RTL1 has the right, above all, to make money and that means we have to be faster than other sites. So the easiest way is to simply copy a good part of the information that ends up in our inbox and put it on our site - that way we manage to generate significantly more articles than our competition, our site seems more active and more up-to-date.

Could one say that we are thus reproducing subjective representations in the political or economic interest of certain players in the public? Yes, one could. But we don’t do our job that easily. We filter out the press releases that don’t exactly fit our mold. Our common sense and our extended circle of acquaintances give us the right indicators of whose press release will ultimately make it to our prestigious site.

- What can be copied? Basically, pretty much any text that makes its way to RTL1’s inbox can be copied. The main thing is that the title sounds like it’s a news story that RTL itself found out.

Here are some examples: