88 percent of newspaper coverage is ‘churnalism’: rewritten wire copy and PR. Only 12 is derived from reporters initiative or is fact checked.

That’s the state of newspaper journalism in Britain according to what Nick Davies has written in his book “Flat Earth News”. You can read more about “Flat Earth News” in a recent London Review of Books article (via dangerousmeta).

No wonder the majority of Americans no longer trust the media and folks like Jeff Jarvis are making an issue of it.

We have a clue we are being spun. And I bet that niche media’s pursuit of ‘authenticity’ – the practice of wrapping news in greater and greater extremes of opinion to seem ‘genuine’ – folks probably feel at an instinctive level the exploitation.

In this environment, it has become more and more difficult to find investigative journalism you might care about or might need to know about.

There are many initiatives that have sprung up over the past few years that attempt to address how investigative journalism can be pursued, developed, created and funded.

Scott Rosenberg shares his doubts about one of the latest, “ProPublica”, a non-profit driven by some big names in traditional journalism.

Think about a story the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published: “Philadelphia faces shortage of housing for mentally ill”. It was front page of the Local section. Some editor thought that I, as a reader, would find that story interesting or pertinent.

In a world driven purely by linkage, PageRank, traffic counts, and other topic based story algorithm filtering systems – would I see that story? Would that story even be written? Who is its audience?

Think about it. And what it means for your knowledge of others that sit outside your topical or social spheres.

Now I’m not saying that algorithm driven – or crowd driven – news filtering is bad. Far from it.

Nor am I saying that a world where only ‘experts’ provide access to the news stories is good. Again far from it.

But the folks who *do* say one or the other are selling something. And it is at our expense.