At The ’Burnian, we do our best to bring the Blackburn and Carlinville community high quality content. When working on hard hitting news or entertaining articles, a lot of our work goes into fact checking sources to ensure we are keeping our news honest. However, we urge you to take the same steps.
Almost everything you are reading will have some sort of research done to back up what the text is saying. When you see text such as “according to (insert name here),” or “(this company name) says,” that is your chance to double check. Find out who is supplying this information and how they came up with it. Especially if there are links to the specific source.
Another aspect of sources to look further into is any sort of advertorials. These are articles that are disguised as regular articles, but are actually sponsored content. For example, an article might seem like a perfectly normal article about a new scientific breakthrough or a movie review, when in reality, they are sponsored by some sort of pharmaceutical company plugging their product and using research to help reinforce, or sponsored by the movies studio. This can be problematic because it will sway the article into what the sponsoring organization wants you to think, rather than an unbiased view from the journalist.
Our newspaper is backed by student workers through the work program, so we are gracious enough to not have to resort to any sort of sponsored content. So we will continue to do our best to give you unbiased, unsponsored articles for you.