In a letter to the editor published in the Dec. 4 edition of the Daily Forty-Niner, one of our readers raised concerns about the sourcing of the news and opinion articles we publish, mentioning that the articles should be sourced in a similar fashion to research papers.
The Daily Forty-Niner does indeed source its stories. Our mission is to inform the campus about on- and off-campus events and issues. We predominantly use people as well as primary documents as sources for our stories.
It is not the function of a newspaper to spoonfeed our readers the information in articles, but rather inspire them to further investigate our articles and provide them with a starting point in their understanding of our stories. A newspaper is fundamentally different from a research paper, and we are not obliged to cite the exact page numbers or include a bibliography on our back page.
The primary function of the opinion page is to provide the readers with different points of view and act as a forum of debate. There are a multitude of sources used when writing an opinion column, which we often site. When limited to a confined, small amount of space, it is redundant to include all of the sources used in a piece, especially when it is not the function of the opinion page to inform.
With that being said, some of the signed columns we have published do lack official sources and mainly reflect the concerns of the writer, especially pertaining to campus issues. We hear you.
