Attribution: Citing Your Sources

One of the most important aspects of reporting news is getting facts from reliable sources and telling your audience in that same sentence what makes the source trustworthy. Any time you use information that is not common knowledge or that does not come from your direct experience, you need to cite your sources.

Note: Google is not a source.

Google and other similar sites which allow you to search for information are search engines. They are often useful, but they are completely unregulated. Anyone with access to a computer, including a second grade research project and a wacko with strong opinions who never leaves his basement can post information on the web that can show up in a Google search. If you are doing research, start with our  library's databases which are filled with sources that have been chosen for their reliability. Next, you may go to specific sites that I are the librarians can recommend to you. Finally, you can use a search engine. Before you use any internet site that you find this way, you will need to evaluate the site's reliability and relevance to your article. On our library homepage, please click on the internet evaluation form and see me for help.

What if all of the information in your article is common knowledge? That's easy. Go do some research! No one wants to read an article that contains no new information. Use the library's databases to find reliable sources and your own intelligence (and my help) to figure out what is relevant. You will also want to do some interviews. For the researched information, take notes that include the publication and date as well as the writer. If the writer is an expert in the field, write that down. If you are including quotes from others inside the article, include their names and what makes these people experts or witnesses. Then add the information to your article, using the directions below for attribution.

What if all the information comes from your own first-hand experience? This is rare. Even when you are speaking about something that you have witnessed, you usually need to relate the material to larger social trends using statistics and other facts. If it is all your story and not connected to others, it is a personal narrative and not a news piece. If it is all your opinion it is an editorial and not a news piece. If you wrote a personal narrative you can fix it by relating your experiences to others with similar experiences, using facts and quotes from experts. If you found you wrote an editorial (and were supposed to write a news piece) you can fix that by taking out the loaded words that are your opinions and instead focus on the facts of the issue. If you wrote a review, you are supposed to express your opinion; add facts by giving information about the restaurant, movie, band, or game that are beyond the scope of your own personal observation.

Facts that are not common knowledge require you to note:

1. Where the information was printed/said/posted. If it was on the internet, you need the url (web) address
2. Who said it? You?
3. What makes this person or organization an expert? Why should we believe this information?
4. What's this information based on?  How reasonable is the source of the information? Say it's a study on weight loss. Was it a study done by the National Institutes of Health? Was the study conducted by an unregulated herbal remedy company promoting its weight loss drug? Was it a survey you conducted with 10 of your friends?
5. When and where did this information come from? Did it come from a reliable source? For instance, did the person speak directly to you, the reporter? Are you referring to something printed in the New York Times? Are you repeating something you heard in the hallways or found on someone's MySpace page?)

How to cite your sources

The good news is we don't use MLA or APA format in news writing. The bad news is you have to find a seamless way to get all the above information into the body of your news story without using a single footnote or endnote!

In newspaper and magazine articles

An Example and Analysis From The New York Times

...And geologists are using the forecasts to deepen their own investigations of plate tectonics.

“It’s tremendous,” said Warren J. Nokleberg, a senior research geologist at the United States Geological Survey in Menlo Park, Calif. “It lets students and scientists better appreciate the mobile Earth, to see where it’s going. That’s very powerful.”

Notice how smoothly the writer slips the attribution into the middle of the quote as an appositive phrase, a phrase that describes a noun. The use of the appositive phrase is usually the least clunky way of citing your source. Of course, this writer is a professional and actually recently interviewed Mr. Nokleberg, so he doesn't need to say where and when these comments were published. In addition, his position as "senior research geologist at the United States Geological Survey" is all the credentials he needs for us to understand why we should believe his words. Your job, as an amateur, is sometimes more difficult.

Another example from the same article:

Despite uncertainties, the field of geopredictions is booming. One Web site has received almost 30 million hits since its debut in 1998, and the field’s admirers now include top scientists.

“It’s quite good pedagogically,” said Frank Press, a geologist and past president of the National Academy of Sciences. “It captures the attention.” 

Dr. Press features one of the forecasts in his introductory college text, “Understanding Earth” (Freeman, 2006). He and three co-authors present a snapshot of how the planet’s surface might look 50 million years from now, calling it “a plausible scenario.”

Among other things, the snapshot shows that Africa has drifted to the north, plowing into Europe and fusing the two landmasses, eliminating the Mediterranean Sea and replacing it with the Mediterranean Mountains. The rugged range runs down the middle of a continent far bigger than current-day Eurasia, a giant new agglomeration that might be called Afrasia.

Notice the appositive phrase in the second paragraph, again.

When the writer refers to the whole college text, he doesn’t need to repeat the author’s name or credentials (nor, apparently, mention who the three co-authors are, just that they exist). Sidenote: he gives us the title of the text in quotes (rather than underline or italics) then the publisher with a comma and date of publication in parentheses. This is New York Times style, not MLA or APA. In journalism, when in doubt, do it like they do at the New York Times, unless your teacher or professor or boss tells you not to, in which case, don't.

What I found particularly clever here is how he refers to the prediction from the text. He calls the scenario a “snapshot” in the second to last paragraph here. Then he begins the next paragraph, “Among other things, the snapshot shows…” This phrase is an elegant substitution for “According to Dr. Press (and his three co-authors)…”

Read the rest of the article to see more examples of attribution and learn more about the future of our planet.