About News Evaluation

How a story was sourced, framed and funded, and what got left out.

What we cover

News Evaluation is about method, not verdicts. We take published journalism apart to show how it was built: who was sourced and what each source could personally know, how the framing was chosen, how numbers were presented, who funded the research being quoted, how the headline relates to the body, and what a reasonable reader would need that the story did not supply. We cover corrections culture as a beat in its own right, because how a publication handles being wrong is the most reliable public signal of how carefully it works. We do not rate outlets on a left to right scale. We evaluate individual pieces of work, including good ones, because the point is to teach a habit that transfers to whatever the reader opens next. One boundary is worth stating up front: we are not a news service and we publish no edition of our own. If you want the day's news reported and finished, that is our sister masthead The News Today. Our subject is the reading, not the day. How to read the news is the whole of our beat, and we do not stray outside it.

How we work

Every analysis answers the same fixed set of questions in the same order, so readers can apply the method themselves rather than trusting our conclusion. We link to and quote the original at sufficient length to be fair, and we read the whole piece before commenting on any part of it. We judge a story against what was knowable at the time it was published, not with hindsight. We say plainly when a piece is sound, and we distinguish an error of fact from a defensible editorial choice we happen to disagree with. Where we cannot establish something, we say we cannot, and we do not fill the gap with implication. News Evaluation is published by SUKH SANDHU PTY LTD (ACN 679 292 392, ABN 49 679 292 392) and is independent of the outlets it examines.

Corrections

A site about other people's errors has to be exact about its own. Corrections are attached to the article that carried the mistake, dated, and written to say what was wrong and what it is now, never softened into a clarification when it was an error. If we mischaracterise a story or a journalist, the correction is as prominent as the original claim and we notify the publication concerned. We keep a running record of our corrections in the open, because a corrections page that stays empty is evidence of nothing except that nobody is looking. Corrections can be requested through the contact address on this site, and journalists whose work we analyse always get a reply.

Who publishes this

News Evaluation is published by Sukh Sandhu Pty Ltd, ACN 679 292 392, ABN 49 679 292 392, an Australian company based in Melbourne, VIC.