How much journalism is the work of PR?

With deep newsroom cuts affecting nearly every paper, editorial content often becomes wire copy, fluff, and stories that are little more than gussied up press releases, Mike Masnick wrote for TechDirt . An Australian study this week found that 55 percent of news stories were driven by PR. “We get pitched stories from PR people all the time, and probably 99.9 percent of them end up getting ignored and trashed — mostly because they’re not even close to relevant, but often because we have n…