Monday Productivity Pointers

- [Jess] My name is Jess Stratton and welcome to this week's edition of Monday Productivity Pointers. Lately, it's never been more important to be a smart consumer of both products and news and information. It used to be a simple check of the website, snopes.com and I've talked about that a lot on Monday Productivity Pointers. But that was just to avoid annoying your friends and Facebook followers. But now it's a little bit more important that you learn how to check details yourself, before hitting share. The first step to doing that, is to turn yourself into more of a savvy researcher.

You can do that by first evaluating the site itself, and then, evaluate in the content and purpose of that site and then, finally, evaluating the content and the author of the article itself. I promise it doesn't take as long as it sounds like it does, we're going to go over it. I have here, a BBC Earth article and I thought it would be a great one to use as an example. So we'll our evaluation in the broadest sense, evaluating the site itself, before we even get to the content.

Look at the url, in this case I can see, that it's BBC.com, which is a reputable site. However in many cases, the url is disguised to look like a reputable site, but it leaves off a letter or is misspelled, or has a different extension other than, .com You can also do a Google search on a website if it's a publication or site you've never heard of before and you can even do a, who is look up to see how long the publication has existed. This is an important one, the longer the site has been around, the better off you are at probably getting good information from it.

You can do a, who is check, by pointing your browser to whois.com On the right hand side, I'll put in, bbc.com and click, who is. I'm interested in this registration date. As you can see here, this website has been around since 1989, so it's been around for a very long time. Other sites will just pop up, maybe just a few months ago. In cases like that, you have to think very carefully about what kind of details and articles that site has.

So we've established that this site is indeed reputable, it passed the first test. Now let's look at the content and purpose of the entire site and the easiest way to do that, is to go to the root address. In this case, bbc.com, this is one of the first things that I do when I'm brought to an article that I've clicked on from Facebook. I'll go directly to the root of the site, because a lot of times, that can tell you a lot about what you're reading. If I scroll down, I can see that this is very clearly a news site.

I can also see that the article to ad ratio is very low, which is good news. I say it's good to evaluate the purpose of the site because if you're reading an article about how bad for you a certain food is, I say, evaluate the purpose of the site because if you're reading an article about how bad for you a certain food product is, you could discover that you're on a site from a company selling a competing product. In fact, if you want to check a site for certain bias, there are websites to help assist with that.

Such as, mediabisfactcheck.com, it sounds like a mouthful, but it is in fact, a great media bias resource that you can use. Let's go back to our article. The two items are checked off and good, we're ready to head and evaluate the actual article itself. Let's start with the author, if the article doesn't even have an author listed, then there's no credibility or accountability for the content. So you can even guess where the information could have come from.

Here we have an author and I can scroll to the bottom of the article, which I like to do, to see if there's a link and maybe some more information about the author. If I research her online, I can see that she's a clear and established science reporter, so right away, we're still looking to be in good shape. In the article itself, you'll want to watch out for generalizations that have no backing information or sources. You'll want to look for statistics that aren't cited so that you can't double check them.

If there's a photo, make sure it has a credit associated with it. Here's a quote and the author has even linked to the profile online of the person who made the quote, which is a great sign. If I scroll further down, I can see a study, and in fact, if I hover my mouse over this and I click the link, I can see that the author has even linked to the study itself, we know it's real. I'm going to scroll back to the top again, this looks like a good one. In time, you'll learn how to very quickly learn how articles contain generalizations, uncited sources and contain huge biases that weren't noticeable before.

Do the test before you hit share and your friends will thank you.