How to Evaluate Sources

Evaluating the Publisher of a Magazine or Newspaper Article

Experienced researchers know that the publisher of a source—the person, organization, government agency, or corporation that prints or electronically distributes a source—plays an important role in shaping its content. Like authors, publishers usually have a bias about a particular topic or issue. In this demonstration, we'll again follow student writer Aaron Batty as he evaluates an article from the news source BBC News.

To learn about the publisher of a magazine or newspaper article, search on the Web. You can often tell whether a publisher is reputable or not by looking at the types of material it publishes.

The newspaper article we are using for this article is published by BBC News, a reputable news source and publisher.

Many publishers have a mission statement on their Web sites. Still others provide enough information on their home pages that you can figure out whether they might have a particular bias. You might already know a fair amount about the biases of a publisher, particularly if the publisher is a major newspaper or magazine, such as The New York Times (considered liberal) or The Wall Street Journal (considered conservative).

Even if a publisher provides fairly little information about its purposes, you can gain some knowledge about it through its Web site. BBC News, for instance, provides an "About BBC" link, which is shown below.

Click on the Continue button to view a demonstration of evaluating the timeliness and comprehensiveness of the article.