LibGuides: UGS 303: Latin America: Environmental History and Sustainability / Knapp: Recommended News Organizations

These are mentioned in your assignment prompt

These are the publications mentioned in your assignment prompt. You can go to the publications' websites, but you may find more coverage in the databases. With these links you'll be able to search within the publication.

Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Use the News limiter on the landing page and filter results by language and date on the results page. This is the best place for a wide range of world news and business sources.
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Effective January 1, 2018, Nexis Uni™ replaces LexisNexis Academic.

Why are these news organizations reliable?

Sometimes broad terms like 'reliable', 'trusted', 'reputation' are applied to news sources. It's hard to grasp how they earned those descriptions.

Instead, it's useful to use the following advice when you are searching on the web and find a source you are not familiar with:

Author: Who wrote the article? If you cannot find the author byline, stop and skip the article and publication. Investigate the author by learning:

Her credentials: Is she a journalist employed by the publication? Where else has she worked?
Her experience/expertise: Does she write about this topic a lot? What else does she write about? This tells you about her subject expertise (science, trade or business).

Editorial board: credible news organizations have editorial boards to ensure the content is up to the publication's standards, to do fact checking, to assign stories to reporters/journalists.

Who are the editors? Investigate their credentials and expertise.

Evidence:

What evidence does the author use to back up his claims?
Can you easily find that evidence?
Did the author use that evidence responsibly, or did he mischaracterize the evidence?
Did the author present an opposing viewpoint, or is the article one-sided?

When in doubt, chat with a librarian or email Elise.

How can you tell if news is credible?

Author byline

Who wrote this article? Are they employed by a publication? Where else have they worked? What else have they written? (hint: you may have to google the author.)

Editorial Board

A publication of good repute has an editorial board. You may do background research on editors as well.

About Us

Does the site have an About Us section? This can be a very telling page. You may learn the publication's intended purpose (entertainment, business news) or intended audience (conservative vs. liberal). (hint: are their affiliated organizations, etc. that you need to google?)

Evidence

What evidence does the author use to back up her claims? If she uses interviews, can you find that quotation elsewhere or check up on the source?

Images

If you are worried that this story is not credible, do a reverse image search and see where else the image pops up. If you see it posted elsewhere, there's a good chance that the article is bogus. A real work of journalism usually includes original images rather than recycled ones.