“Try out “Churnalism” to avoid plagiarism and repackaged Press Releases” was the teaser on an email from the Sunlight Foundation this morning.

In our Reporting Group at Sunlight, we know how important it is to get a story out on deadline. We also know that being “the first to break the news” in some newsrooms — can affect the credibility of a story.

This is why we have created Churnalism US — a new web tool and browser extension that allows you to compare the news you read against existing content to uncover possible instances of plagiarism.

See why The Atlantic calls Churnalism an open-source plagiarism detection engine.

To use Churnalism, simply feed in a link or block of text to the Churnalism site or let the browser extension run in the background to notify you of any matches of text from Churnalism’s cache of documents. These documents include most articles in Wikipedia, press releases from PR Newswire, PR News Web, EurekaAlert!, congressional leadership offices, the White House, a sampling of Fortune 500 companies, prominent philanthropic foundations and much more.

Check out this short video on how to use Churnalism and avoid repackaging press releases.

I haven’t given it a test drive yet, but thought you might want to give it a try.