Saturday's Guardian sport had an "interview" with the Fulham footballer Danny Murphy that was blatantly cut-and-pasted from an email written by a PR person from the club.
How could anyone think that this sounds like real human speech patterns?:
"Like them, Fulham are now an efficient unit, hard to beat. We don't play with great width, attacking wingers and dribblers, but with effective team players who get it down and play."
And that is just two lines taken from a speech of no less than 140 words long, end to end.
Danny Murphy's words are in quotation marks, next to a big photo of the player, under the heading "Saturday interview", so to me that is claiming it's him talking.
I'm sure this happens all the time - this isn't the first time I've thought "that doesn't sound like a person talking" - and that I'm the only one who isn't already in on the joke. I'm not even all that bothered - the tabloids are probably nothing but.
I just don't like being taken for a mug when it's so badly written.
It must be easy to build or adapt software that scours news sites for anything within quotes, analyses the word patterns and marks up those that were written by PRs - it probably already exists somewhere. If you mashed this up (are they still called "mash ups"?) with PR company client lists and the names of in-house PRs and cross referenced it with journalists' names, you could map who was lying on behalf of who (should that be "whom"?).
You could probably even build in some sort of quality scale to identify the PRs who were crap writers and which journalists were laziest.
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