4 ms·

It shocks me to this day that news articles and journalists barely cite their sources. The best I have seen is shitty hyperlinked sources l, which are subject t

• carlosjobim 1y ago
  Open source journalism is the only kind of open source I can stand behind. Completely. Anything else isn't really journalism.
  • kurthr 1y ago
    Um, No True Journalist?
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      Jornalists who hide their sources are usually also manipulated by those sources. How do you make sure as a journalist to get access to high ranking sources within the powers that be? You write the stories they want, or they're not talking to you anymore. Every journalist will experience politicians and other powerful people wanting to tell them things "off the record". If they enter into those kind of agreements they are also betraying their profession and their audience.
      • orev 1y ago
        > are usually also manipulated by those sources Citation needed.
        • reaperducer 1y ago
          Agreed. This person has never been a journalist. / Former journalist
        • carlosjobim 1y ago
          Why are you asking questions whose answers you are not capable of understanding? An anonymous source has the power to decide what information she lets the journalist have, and thus she controls the exchange. If the journalist does something to displease the source, then the journalist is cut off from the information.
          • quesera 1y ago
            > An anonymous source has the power A non-anonymous source can also practice intentionally-controlled, agenda-servicing, and pleasure-contingent disclosure. I would estimate that most do.
            • carlosjobim 1y ago
              Yes the will always, the difference is that the public will be able to judge for themselves. And people with a different view have somebody to respond to in public discourse. And it will be a lot different for a named source to defend why she is making public some things and hiding other things.
      • simonw 1y ago
        If you are a journalist working with a source who asks to stay anonymous your number one job is to ensure that they aren't lying to you in order to to advance their own agenda. Obviously they have an agenda, and want to advance it, so you need to figure out what that agenda is. The next challenge is confirming that what they are telling you is true, to an appropriate level of confidence at least. Your professional ethics and your editor (and your legal team at larger publications) won't let you publish if you can't do that. There are many ways you can do that - ask them to show you supporting evidence (usually documents) for example - but the most common is to try and find a different source who can confirm what they are telling you is true. If you can get two sources - anonymous or not - to confirm the same detail and you're reasonably confident that those sources don't know about each other that's often good enough to get to something you can publish.
        • carlosjobim 1y ago
          Unless the source is a whistleblower, their agenda will usually be dirty if they want to be anonymous. And then you're at their whim, because they control the flow of information. If they're showing supporting documents, those documents should be open sourced* to the public or they shouldn't be seen by the journalist. * As much as needed for the public to be able to verify.
• t-3 1y ago
  If they cite their sources, next time you might just check the sources instead of them, or be able to tell when they're making shit up, or be able to see what they're careful not to say. Hiding the sources and being the middleman for truth gives journalists continued employment and increases their value.
  • Retric 1y ago
    > next time you might just check the sources instead of them That’s really not the point of journalism. Not every story makes it to HN’s front page let alone every document. That kind of filtering for interesting info has real value as I don’t want to read every court document, press release, etc for relevant information.
    • nailer 1y ago
      It seems you think most journalists are benevolent. The parent poster is making the point that some journalists seek power by filtering and manipulating the conversation. That also seems reasonable. You can look at some cases of hoaxes perpetuated by the media that were clearly designed to create controversy and enhance the writer’s profile at the expense of what actually happened.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      • Retric 1y ago
        Not benevolent, the goal is generally somewhere between entertainment, advertising, and propaganda. My point was nobody comes back if it’s not generally interesting, that’s the baseline for the industry.
    • t-3 1y ago
      Providing summaries of stuff that happened for people who don't have time to actually look at original sources or sort the wheat from the chaff but still want to pay attention is a useful service, but an awful lot of what passes for journalism these days is just a train of people summarizing or rewriting another person's summary of a rewriting of a summary. If you check multiple news sites on a regular basis, it's easy to find nearly-identical articles popping up with little-to-no difference in content that masquerade as original or at best obliquely name drop another outlet or journalist in the middle of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph near the end of the article.
• reaperducer 1y ago
  What’s the point of learning APA or MLA citation in high school and college but journalists don’t even bother with it? Because journalism doesn't use the same type of citation as an academic paper. It's an entirely different type of writing, for a different purpose, and a different audience. If you want to know why journalists use anonymous sources, you could just Google it: https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous-sources.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/why-new-york-times-anonymous... But I suppose complaining on the internet and making up false equivalencies is better for feeding one's righteous indignation.
  • jowea 1y ago
    I'm not 100% sure if previous poster is annoyed at the same thing as me, but if that is the case, we're not annoyed at the newspapers not giving names to their anonymous sources. It's when they do science reporting and say "a new study says blah" without linking to the study. Or they paraphrase a law proposal submitted by some lawmaker without linking to the original text. Or they repeat something they got from another news source without pointing it out. And even if they do, as the previous poster mention, it is subject to link rot. Frankly I think they do that because of the attention economy. Less eyeballs leaving their site.
• AStonesThrow 1y ago
  Journalists protect their sources all the time. This is common practice in journalism and it actually helps to keep things neutral. It also helps to protect the innocent. If a journalist protects her sources then she can rely on a steady stream of information from them. If she divulges or betrays those sources, they could be reluctant to feed her further information. A source may be at political or legal risk for leaking to the press. The journalist therefore acknowledges those risks by protecting the identities of the sources. It is the editorial board of the news outlet who is responsible for vetting sources and fact-checking. Another very important function of journalism is analysis. The editorial board and the reporters are collating various sources of information and providing their expertise by analyzing these facts, distilling them and presenting them to the public with a unified front. It is true that an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia has different standards, and generally citations on an encyclopedia must be transparent and open. Encyclopedias are tertiary sources, not journalism, and they rely on that analysis and presentation by journalistic sources in order to present comprehensive information on a topic. Now with all that being said, TFA seems to be about an independent journalist who is the victim of widespread plagiarism. That isn't nearly the same thing. If this journalist is getting ripped off by major news outlets, that is certainly a problem. Every journalist deserves a byline and credit for writing those stories. This journalist is not a source, in herself, but rather producing print-ready material that should not be ripped off, willy-nilly, by any outlet that thinks they can get away with it. If these allegations are true, then that is quite unjust.
  • triceratops 1y ago
    They're talking about source documents, not people who are sources.
• jameshart 1y ago
  Sadly I think people are confusing ‘citing sources’ with ‘journalistic sources’ which are two different things. Journalists are generally very good at attributing information to journalistic sources. That is, when they relay a claim someone has made, they state who made that claim - ideally by naming them, but if the person making the claim wishes to remain anonymous and the journalist chooses to respect that anonymity, by attributing the information to e.g. ‘sources familiar with the matter’; in such a case the journalist is asserting ‘I know this person is in a position to know this information, but I can’t tell you who that is’. That’s all fine. And has nothing to do with APA or MLA citation standards though. When it comes to citing reporting from other media, there’s definitely some sloppiness. In general the instinct is to use the same ‘journalistic sourcing’ standard as above, but caveat it with a sort of hearsay warning: ‘according to reporting in the Washington Post, sources familiar with the meeting said “…”’. And that’s where Marisa Kabas’s complaints lie: she wants to get that level of attribution which print journalists typically accord one another, and not be relegated to ‘an independent journalist’. But when it comes to citations, the thing you’re most right about where journalists often do not cite their sources is in the form of linking to primary material they used in preparation of the report. Academic papers, government reports, court judgements, official transcripts of speeches… there’s a lot of primary documents it would be great to be able to get hold of if you want to dig further into a story.
• monkeyelite 1y ago
  > What’s the point of learning APA or MLA citation To give teachers an objective criteria to grade with - in an otherwise subjective assignment.