User:Cjustineday/Evaluate an Article

Which article are you evaluating?
Local news

Why you have chosen this article to evaluate?
I chose this article because we having discussing local news frequently in class. At first glance, this article seems to be a little short and unbalanced.

Evaluate the article
(Compose a detailed evaluation of the article here, considering each of the key aspects listed above. Consider the guiding questions, and check out the examples of what a useful Wikipedia article evaluation looks like.)


 * The lead is very concise and provides a good overview of the topic. The first sentence does a good job of defining what makes this article different from other news.
 * The content does not seem completely balanced. Very little space is given to newspapers compared to television. Facebook is the only company mentioned and seemed to be somewhat biased against the company. The largest section is news about practices in other countries, but the countries provided are almost all Western countries, so the section is extremely Eurocentric. While it might be relevant, I feel that it is unnecessary to the specific broadcast times of random news stations in other countries.
 * As mentioned before, the tone of the article seems that the article has a slight bias against Facebook, since they are the only tech platform mentioned and it does not seem to be a very nuanced discuss on their impact on local news. Also, it seems very US and Europe centered, as all of the examples are of US or British news companies.
 * This article does not use sources throughout. The Differences and Newspapers sections have no sources at all, and the practices in other countries section does not have sources for many fo the statements. Some of the sources are anywhere from 5-20 years old, which seems unacceptable since the decline of local news has occurred mainly in the last 10 years. Furthermore, lots of the sources are to news publications rather than peer reviewed academic articles. I don't feel that the sources represent the full range of research on the topic because the article itself does not cover the entire topic effectively. The authors are predominantly white.
 * I feel like the writing in the article is a little repetitive and lengthy, but decently clear. The article is not well organized because the sections are not covered equally and it seems that many parts of the topic are left out.
 * There are no visual elements.
 * The talk page is not very active at all. Most of the minimal discussion occurred in 2007, with one comment in 2015. The article is stub-class rated and mid level importance. It is part of Wikipedia's Journalism project. The page is a lot less active compared to what we discussed in class.
 * Overall, I think the article needs a lot of work. It does a good job opening the topic and beginning to explore it, but the content is ultimately outdated, unbalanced, and incomplete. I think more sections with better balanced content would be needed to improve this article.