Talk:Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway

Assessment comment
Substituted at 05:57, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Newspapers as sources
May I make the observation that using nineteenth-century newspapers as factual sources has certain dangers? They are excellent at adding contemporary colour (although they are sometimes too keen on repeating lengthy speeches verbatim). But they can be careless about dates, and factual detail in general. They tended to accept announcements ("The railway will be opened next Monday...") as historical facts. Worse, they tended to reprint material from other newspapers uncritically, so that if weekly newspaper A prints "The railway opened last Monday" and weekly newspaper B picks that up and reprints it a week later, they very, very often didn't bother to alter the reference, so it still comes out as "last Monday". Other detail often went over the head of a journalist -- we see that today where often enough a newspaper has got the wrong end of the stick.

Just saying. Afterbrunel (talk) 15:56, 1 November 2019 (UTC)