Chequebook journalism

Chequebook journalism (or checkbook journalism in American English) is the form of journalism where the essential characteristic is that the journalist pays the subject of the work for the right to publish their story.

The phrase "chequebook journalism" is a pejorative and rhetorical term. It highlights that stories obtained by paying people are of less a hard news character than those generated by conventional investigation. The News of the World became a notorious publication for such practices, often discovered attempting to buy stories off key witnesses in criminal trials such as the Moors murders case, and the 1999 trial of Gary Glitter on charges of assaulting an underage teenage fan; shortly before its closure in 2011 the paper was revealed to have bribed police officers to obtain material for a series of news stories concerning Jennifer Elliott, daughter of the actor Denholm Elliott.