Sourcing Online News Agencies

I am attempting to source a CNN story properly via their online news source. Is the below citation correct?

 

1.      Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin, “A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital's secret list,” 23 Apr 2014 (http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/23/health/veterans-dying-health-care-delays/: accessed 03 Jan 2017).

Submitted byEEon Wed, 01/04/2017 - 08:47

Two tweaks, Twyrch.

(1)

If we cite an article in a newspaper or magazine, we also cite the title of that newspaper or magazine, right? Similarly, if we cite an article at a website, we also cite the title of the website.  That principle would give us this:

Scott Bronstein and Drew Griffin, “A fatal wait: Veterans languish and die on a VA hospital's secret list,”CNN: Health (http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/23/health/veterans-dying-health-care-delays/: accessed 03 January 2017).

Yes, in the present case, a reader can discern from the URL the name of the website you are quoting. However, that is often not the case and in today's world, even with major news organizations, there are spurious clones whose URLs contains the name of the authentic news sites. Thus, it is better to follow the standard rule even if it does mean adding 11 more characters to the citation.

(2)

The posting date of the article is part of the URL. We do not have to repeat it in a separate field.

Thanks for the tweaks, Elizabeth. One question arises from your explanation, however. CNN is just as visible in the URL as the article's date and since neither are always included in the weblink, why would we treat the date differently from the website name?

Submitted byEEon Thu, 01/05/2017 - 09:19

Twyrch, you ask why the website needs to be identified when the letters "cnn" appear in the URL. There are multiple reasons, but I'll give you one that draws from recent news.  Remember the publicity about the "fake news" websites that use the URL of legitimate news sites as part of their own URL, in order to mislead the unwary? 

The core pieces of information that citations call for are there not only to tell us and our own readers where to find something, but--equally important, if not more so--also to aid in the evaluation of reliability. Addressing each of them may slow us down when creating a citation. They may take a few extra characters of space. But the habit of always evaluating a site carefully and identifying it as explicitly as possible in our citation is a fundamental trait for researchers and one that saves us a lot of grief--not to mention helping our own readers evaluate the reliability of the claims that we, ourselves, are making.