Table 1: Average net paid sales per issue, December quarter 2008Source: Audit Bureau of Circulations The Newsroom In October 2008, the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance (MEAA) conducted a survey of Australian newsrooms as part of its Future of Journalism initiative. It found deep concerns about staffing levels, increased hours and stress. While the survey focussed on a number of areas of significant change within newsrooms, by far the most comments concerned quality suffering due to increased workload. Almost two in five respondents said their work suffered due to increased hours and workload, while only one in five said new technology had improved quality. One reporter worried: “The upshot for print journalists is we are being stretched further and further, so our work suffers. Most of us are now doing at least four print stories a day, plus online work, so there is no choice but to put in the minimum number of calls and pump the words out.” (See Figure 1) 
 Another predicted: “internet deadlines will encourage me to write inferior stories with little thought”. Still another feared: Reduction in staff numbers and quality journalism due to loss of revenue. Some reporters are expected to run opinionated blogs, while writing unbiased news stories on the same subject. This reflects and impacts on journalism standards. Much of the internet material is simply cut and paste rather than real journalism. Reporters do not have enough time to do quality work when their days are divided between supplying newspaper and online copy.  ‘Churnalism’ In 2008, award-winning British investigative journalist, Nick Davies, published an examination of the operation of daily newspapers in the United Kingdom—called Flat Earth Journalism. Research commissioned for the book found 80 percent of the stories in Britain’s quality dailies in a two-week period were rewritten wire copy (such as Associated Press) and media releases; reporters generated just 12 percent with the remaining 8 percent originating from unknown sources. To describe this phenomenon of ‘press release journalism’, Davies coined the term ‘churnalism’. The two biggest Australian studies of ‘churnalism’ date from 1993 and 2001. In his 1993 study, Jim Macnamara found that of 2 500 articles published during a year, 31 percent were wholly or partly based on news releases, “including exact extracts or facts and figures without alternative attribution”. In 2001, Clara Zawawi analysed 683 articles published by Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail, Sydney’s The Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s The Age, finding 251 (or 37 percent) directly resulted from public relations. Surveys, papers and submissions sent to journalists with the intent of gaining media coverage accounted for another 88 articles. She concluded 47 per cent of articles in the newspapers were the result of PR activity.