Writing 10 (Burnett, Spring 2023)

Characteristics of Reputable Newspapers

• publishes accurate content; checks facts, and if errors are made, corrects them
• uses reputable sources (people, documentation) and verifies those sources
• presents headlines which accurately represent the article content; headlines don't play on readers' emotions
• clearly identifies authors of articles with bylines
• produces its own content; doesn't merely aggregate content from other sources
• clearly identifies content types (e.g. report vs. editorial)
• conducts reporting not just editorializing
• employs journalists who follow the profession's code of ethics
  • Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) Code of Ethics, four main sections: Seek Truth and Report It, Minimize Harm, Act Independently, Be Accountable and Transparent
  • 10 Elements to Good Journalism (American Institute Press), selected from Kovach and Rosenstiel's book The Elements of Journalism.

NewsBank is actually a collection of databases. Each NewsBank database features a set of newspapers with different themes and coverage: NewsBank-Major Metro Newspapers, NewsBank-Acceda Noticias (newspapers in Spanish), NewsBank-Special Reports, and so forth. For this class, we'll be using NewsBank-Access News World. Here's the link:

NewsBank-Access World News

You can also access NewsBank-Access World News by going to the "Databases" link in the library's home page, clicking "N" in the alphabet at the top of the page, and scrolling to NewsBank-Access World in the list of databases with titles beginning with N.

USING NEWSBANK-ACCESS WORLD NEWS TO FIND ARTICLES ABOUT STATE/LOCAL ISSUES

From the main NewsBank-AWN page, scroll down a bit. Look for the blue box marked "USA-California" and click.

From here, you can search by keywords in the headline or text of the article, or by source (the title of the newspaper you want to search), or other options.