 1. News. What is classified as news? Why is it important to you as a student at IRSC? And how do you find news articles that would normally cost money or require a subscription to download if you visited the publication's website? These are the issues we will tackle with this video. News articles provide a snapshot of the current conversation about a topic at a particular moment in time. News articles are published once a journalist obtains enough information about an issue to start to put together a timeline or angle of a particular issue. In this way, news articles give more information with greater context than a tweet or other live social media coverage, but usually will not provide quite as much in-depth or victim perspective as a magazine article or documentary created after an event has taken place. A typical newspaper either in print or online contains several different types of stories, and it's important to know what you're looking at when considering the use of a newspaper article for a source for a college level assignment. News stories, for the most part, are what are acceptable for college work. These are written by journalists. The subject matter of the article is easily identifiable from its headline. Newspaper articles are a great place to find statistics about a topic, interviews of people affected by a particular issue, quick and easy to read explanations of laws or scientific research recently published, and more. These stories are written by journalists and appear online on TV and radio, and in some cases in print as well. What differentiates a news story from a tweet or other social media post by someone posting online about something is that the information that is published in the news is verified most of the time, and if there's an error made in the publication, the news organization has a process to print a retraction or a correction once the error is realized. Look for articles with author's names listed. If there is something questionable about the news article you're considering using as a source for an upcoming project, look up the author and see what else they've written. If you think an article is biased, look for other news articles on that topic from other publications to gain a fuller grasp on how the issue was treated in the media at the time the event happened. There are also opinion pieces published in news outlets. These could be called op-eds, columns, editorials. Sometimes these are written by a journalist or an editorial board, but at other times are written by community leaders or experts on a topic of interest. The facts that are provided in these op-eds have to be taken on the word of the author. This does not mean that these types of articles do not sometimes provide good information, but it means they need a different level of scrutiny when evaluating how appropriate they might be to use as a source. These types of articles are usually not accepted as an educated article for college-level essays. See the radar video linked below in the description for additional tips on evaluating sources. Letters to the editor are thus that, opinions, complaints, and suggestions from readers of the newspaper that get printed in the paper. These are not acceptable sources for most college-level essays. Most full-text articles on a topic being researched for a college-level essay cost money to access if you visit a news organization's website directly. Please never subscribe to a publication or pay a download fee to access an article for use in a school project. Through the library's databases, all IRSC students and staff have access to millions of dollars worth of newspaper and magazine articles from all across the world. Databases are specialty search engines that let you log in from the library's website. Some databases specialize in newspaper articles while others offer access to a wide range of different formats of information, and newspaper articles are one of the limiters you may choose from. One database worth checking out that specializes in providing access to a wide range of newspaper articles from across the United States is called News Bank. Many other databases also offer newspapers. If you need assistance locating newspaper articles on your topic or evaluating the credibility of a particular article you find, please reach out to a librarian. We're here to help.