As someone with a bit more education than most, it frustrates reading newspaper articles about "recent" findings.
Today's Vancouver Sun has an article about how obesity raises the risk of influenza and respiratory diseases. I typically try to track down the original journal article for such things to have a better idea of the research that was done. So, I dig up the original article from the International Journal of Obesity and it is from May 2013.
Now, this may be recent in terms of being within the last year but in this age of super short news cycles, social media and almost non-existent information retention information should have the ability to reach a broader audience a lot faster.
At least this time they actually referred to the actual journal along with the senior author's name. Some references are so difficult to track down that the news writer may as well have made up the story.
Coming from an academic background where everything you say write to be backed up by a reference, these newspaper articles would receive a failing grade. I'm not in industry but things could definitely be done better.
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