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Journal article

Detecting textual reuse in news stories, at scale

Abstract:

Motivated by the debate around “churnalism” and online media, this paper develops, evaluates, and validates a computational method for detecting shared text between different news articles, at scale, using n-gram shingling. We differentiate between newswire copy, public relations material, source-to-source copying, and common-source and incidental overlaps.
We evaluate the method, quantitatively and qualitatively, and show that it can effectively handle newswire content, copying, and other forms of reuse.
Substantively, we find lower levels of news agency and press release copy reuse than suggested by previous studies. We conclude that the news agency finding is robust, but the lack of press release copy found might reflect limitations of the method and the changing practices of journalists.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publication website:
https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/9904/2777

Authors

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Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
SSD
Department:
Oxford Internet Institute
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0002-6971-8614



Publisher:
University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism
Journal:
International Journal of Communication More from this journal
Volume:
13
Issue:
2019
Pages:
4173–4197
Publication date:
2019-09-01
Acceptance date:
2019-06-24
EISSN:
1932-8036


Keywords:
Pubs id:
pubs:1046102
UUID:
uuid:99d17440-244b-49c6-9c6a-1d4e1a914709
Local pid:
pubs:1046102
Source identifiers:
1046102
Deposit date:
2019-08-19
ARK identifier:

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