Judging Online Sources
How to tell a reported fact from an opinion piece from an advertisement — and the signals that a page is trying to persuade rather than inform.
Almost everything you read in English now arrives without the context a newspaper page used to provide. Working out what kind of thing you are reading is now the reader's job.
What kind of page is this?
News report — reports events, attributes claims, names sources Opinion / comment — argues a position; usually labelled, sometimes only in small print Sponsored content — an advertisement written to look like an article. Look for sponsored, promoted, partner content, in association with Press release — written by the organisation it is about; no independent verification Aggregator — repackages someone else's reporting, often with a stronger headline
Sponsored content is designed to be mistaken for reporting. The label is legally required but deliberately small.
Questions worth asking
Who wrote it? A named author with a track record is different from "Staff Writer" or nobody.
Who pays for the site? Advertising, subscriptions, an industry body and a campaign group all produce different incentives.
When was it published? An undated page is a warning. A five-year-old statistic presented as current is a common problem.
What is the source of the numbers? "Studies show" with no link means nothing. A link to the actual study lets you check whether it says what is claimed.
Does the headline match the article? Headlines are often written by someone else and overstate the content. If the body hedges where the headline asserts, trust the body.
The pattern to watch for
Headline: Coffee cures anxiety, study finds Body: …a small observational study found participants who drank coffee reported slightly lower anxiety scores. Researchers cautioned that the effect may reflect other lifestyle factors.
Every step downgrades the claim. This is extremely common in health and science coverage, and the headline is the part that gets shared.
Signals of persuasion rather than information
- Emotional language in a supposedly factual piece
- Only one side quoted
- Statistics with no source
- "Experts say" without naming any
- Urgency: act now, before it's too late
- An unrelated conclusion: an article about a problem that ends by recommending one product
Practical habit
Before sharing or citing anything: read past the headline, check the date, and find the original source. Three checks, under a minute, and they catch most of it.
Test yourself
The quiz below asks what kind of page you are looking at.