News Literacy Starter
Sourcing, provenance, and the attention economy — how to build a news diet that makes you smarter.
Sources
Source hierarchy
Not all sources are equal. A pyramid of credibility helps you assess.
Primary sources
Original documents — government reports, court filings, research papers, first-hand witnesses.
Quality secondary
Journalism that does original reporting — NYT, FT, Reuters, AP, BBC, Economist, Le Monde.
Analysis and opinion
Think tanks, op-eds, commentary. Reliable analysis cites evidence; unreliable argues from assertion.
Aggregators
Flipboard, Apple News, Google News. Useful for discovery; don't mistake the aggregator for the reporting.
Types of news content
Key Points
- News report: facts of an event, reported by staff or wire.
- News analysis: interpretation of events — often labeled 'Analysis' in the headline.
- Opinion / editorial: argument presenting the author's view.
- Explainer: background on a topic for non-specialists.
- Feature: long-form reported story, often narrative.
- Wire: Reuters, AP, AFP — distributed to thousands of outlets.
Attention Economy
How incentives shape the news
What the editor optimizes for shapes what the reader sees.
Key Points
- Ad-supported: engagement drives revenue. Headlines maximize clicks, not comprehension.
- Subscription: quality drives revenue. Gradual shift to more substantive journalism post-2015.
- Non-profit: mission-driven (ProPublica, The Texas Tribune). Often does investigative work.
- State-sponsored: editorial lines align with sponsor interest. RT, CGTN, Press TV at one extreme; BBC and NHK professionally insulated but publicly funded.
Algorithmic curation
The feeds on Facebook, TikTok, X, and YouTube are algorithmically ordered to maximize engagement. That's different from what a human editor would pick.
Key Points
- Polarizing content gets more engagement. Don't assume what's popular is what's informative.
- Filter bubbles are real but less total than early writers (Pariser 2011) claimed.
- Follow specific journalists and outlets — not just the algorithm.
Building a Diet
Three-layer news diet
Layer 1: Wire / daily
5-10 min a day. Reuters or AP headlines. Factual baseline of what happened.
Layer 2: Analysis
20-30 min, 3-4x/week. Financial Times, Economist, or similar. Understand why events matter.
Layer 3: Depth
1-2 long-form pieces/week. New Yorker, Atlantic, long-form investigations. The 'deep context' layer.
Practices
Key Points
- Read the article, not the headline. Headlines are written by editors, not reporters, and distort.
- Notice the dateline and the correspondent. A 'Kyiv' dateline from a named reporter is different from 'editors in London.'
- Read across the political spectrum weekly. The NYT and the Wall Street Journal together beat either alone.
- Cross-check big claims with a second source before sharing.
FAQ
Who should I trust?
No single outlet is fully reliable. Evaluate per-story: who's reporting, what evidence is cited, whether other outlets corroborate. Your trust should be calibrated and conditional.
Is TikTok / YouTube a legitimate news source?
Individual creators can be excellent (Johnny Harris on geography, Philip DeFranco on daily news). But the platform as a whole has no editorial standards. Verify specific claims from original sources before believing.
Continue learning
Explore related MUN guides to deepen your skills.