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Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
21–30 of 56 posts
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#22This is changing. Many journalists would love to share and link to their primary source documents, but don't have an easy-enough way to do it. At DocumentCloud, we're trying to change that. Here is a list of newsrooms that use DocumentCloud to share their sources -- you'll notice most of the usual suspects in there: http://www.documentcloud.org/public/#search/ Here's a good example of a major 5-part story that cites…
Is part of the problem that a lot of professional media is from a print-oriented perspective, so that in the journalistic/editing mindset and initial target medium hyperlinking isn't possible?
Really, it's that publishing at the scale of a big paper requires separation of responsibilities. The workflow hasn't caught up to the new medium -- and neither has the publishing software. Newspapers are notoriously slow to adopt new tools. The New York Times was composed using linotype machines until 1978 -- about 20 years late -- and when I worked there in the late 1990s the pagination system (essentially, the CMS) was a green screen application running on a few rows of PDP-11s.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
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http://www.badscience.net is Ben Goldacre's blog, and he publishes his Guardian articles there.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
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Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#25In theory, journalists have jobs that are about synthesis, not information. You read the story about the local town council meeting mainly because it is entertaining and engaging, not because it's a summary of the meeting notes.
That's a very difficult thing for technical people to grasp. Sometimes I think we view everything online as various versions of wikipedia, and it's not like that at all.
In practice, sure, they do a bad job many times. Sometimes they just copy and paste Press Releases. Many times they bungle a quote (Although most quotes are problematic to use verbatim. People don't talk in real life like they do in movies and books) But reporting is an art, not an algorithm. Reporters and editors are supposed to be very good at taking multiple sources, including the reporters own generated research, and mashing it together into something greater than the sum of the parts.
I don't have an opinion one way or the other about linking to primary sources. If I had to choose I guess I'd like for them always to be included. But the idea that somehow it's going to make a big difference doesn't add up for me. For researchers, sure. But not for the average reader.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#26Most likely the reason is simple: Journalists[1] are not digital natives. They don't understand or "get" the web. The tools they use don't understand very much beyond print and make linking cumbersome. [1] and obviously here I'm using a very broad brush -- Ben Goldacre is a good example of a young doctor / writer who really gets the web and there are quite a few others.
The academic literature has been citing sources for far longer than the web's been around.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#27I think one of the main reasons may be that a lot of what appears to be journalism actually isn't - it's press releases from various companies and organisations, known as "churnalism". It's surprisingly easy to find churnalism, even in what appear to be fairly authoritative news sources (see churnalism.com). If journalists routinely cited their sources they would have to admit that often large sections have been copi…
But the point of the article was that in at least one of the three stories mentioned, the journalists appear not to have even read the press release for the study in question.
Journalist are probably even less inclined to be caught doing that.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#28Because journalists don't read primary sources. More often than not they're not even aware of them. Here's the problem: Almost all media outlets are in crisis mode so they're cutting down on their staff, meaning that a smaller number of journalists have to write the same amount of stories as before to fill the paper (or website). There simply isn't time for proper research if you have to write five articles a day. So…
I think a journalist from the Daily Mail probably has no idea what a primary source even is.
Oh, I'm pretty sure they do. Not because their main stream articles are any good, but because they seem to go out and find the really weird stories and jazz them up. They get a lot of play on fark.com and they like to put up bigger pictures that tends to draw the links on entertainment stories. Not good journalism, but they seem to have brought their newsstand game to the web in a fairly smart fashion.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#29Because journalists don't read primary sources. More often than not they're not even aware of them. Here's the problem: Almost all media outlets are in crisis mode so they're cutting down on their staff, meaning that a smaller number of journalists have to write the same amount of stories as before to fill the paper (or website). There simply isn't time for proper research if you have to write five articles a day. So…
That is a pretty sweeping generalization. I work for a public radio station. Our journalists routinely interview primary sources, sometimes live on the air. We also transcribe those interviews and put them on the web. We've also been increasing the size of our news staff, not decreasing. It's not all doom and gloom, it just depends on the medium and the revenue model.
Re: Why don’t journalists link to primary sources?
#30This. This is why I do not read newspapers or most non-academic journalism. I have taken journalism courses at grade school, high school, and college levels and they ALL cover the idea of finding and citing primary and secondary sources and that all other sources are dubious, yet somehow once you get a degree in journalism this entire idea goes out the window!