Internet Sites and Research

Internet sites are pages, articles, videos and forums published online. They are one of the most common places to research a media product, and they are quick, wide-ranging and free — but anyone can publish, so you must judge how far to trust each one.

Why they are useful

• Huge amount of information — you can find material on almost any topic, from niche hobby communities to national news.
• Quick to search — a search engine returns pages in seconds, so you spend less time hunting through shelves.
• Usually free — little or no cost, which matters for a small production team on a tight budget.
• Often up to date — organisations and news sites post updates within minutes, which matters when a topic changes quickly.

Reliability and accuracy

Anyone can publish on the internet. No editor checks a personal blog or a random forum post before it appears, so information may be inaccurate (wrong figures, or mistakes copied from page to page), biased (written to sell something or push one opinion) or fake (invented to attract clicks).

Reliability varies by type of site. A government health page, a university department site or a long-established news organisation normally has checks in place; a post from an account with no name behind it, or a page someone set up last weekend, may have none.

Because of this, a fact found online needs checking with a second source that is independent of the first. Suppose a fan site claims a new game cost £150 million to make. Before you quote that in a feature, find out who runs the site and look for the same figure from an independent industry source.

Internet research is usually secondary, because someone else has already gathered and written the information. But whether a site gives you primary or secondary material depends on its content, not on the fact that it is online: a museum page publishing visitor figures its own staff counted at the doors is primary material, while a travel blog that gathers up other people's reviews of the same museum is secondary.