Journatic is the sweatshop of journalism, and it's changing the face of journalism. Well, they tried to, at least.
A segment on "This American Life's" "Switcheroo" episode 468 delved into the controversy surrounding Journatic.
The company of Journatic aims to produce more than 100,000 hyper-local stories a week, hyper-local meaning stories about trash pickup schedules to the new restaurant opening down the road in your community.
In fact, Journatic is creating this deluge of quick, short stories by outsourcing contributors, primarily the Philippines.
The company plugs enormous amounts of data and public information and records into various data bases that they own, and they pay people to create stories from this information.
Most of their writers live in the U.S., yet almost half are overseas, working between 35-45 cents a story. Yep, cents.
Journatic also changes their bylines to more generic names, like Jenny Cox.
"This American Life" spoke to Journatic writer Ryan Smith of Chicago.
Smith told "This American Life" that he doesn't even understand Journatic completely, and he said he believes that journalism is supposed to be a local institution, founded by people who care about the people in that community.
I agree completely with Smith's statement about journalism as a local institution, and Journatic is inauthentic, ethically wrong and frankly, disgusting.
Journatic isn't producing good journalism; it's producing automated-like pieces of crap with little thought or care about the stories or the people behind them.
It's ruining the heart and connection to journalism that hyper-local reporters need and should thrive on.
The only way to write a riveting piece about the trash pickups in a small neighborhood in Illinois is if you actually go there and speak to a garbageman, not grab some "facts" from a database and paste it together, hoping it's correct.
Journatic is all around wrong, and although it may be cheaper to outsource rather than hire more hyper-local, community journalists or begin a small community newspaper, I think we can all agree that the cheap way is not always the best way.
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