Item type - media report

meraine · August 29, 2020

When I save what I would call news items from online media outlets, Zotero categorises them as web pages. There seems to me to be no way to identify them as articles, like newspaper articles, but online. Am I missing something?

adamsmith · August 29, 2020

There are no clear lines between any of these item types, but a newspaper article with a URL is an online newspaper article and a magazine article with a URL is an online magazine article.

meraine · August 29, 2020

Thanks. I'm thinking of news outlets like the news website of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Commission), but any media website is the same. Zotero considers them to be web pages, and so ignores the name of the journalist, the name of the media organisation, and (sometimes) the date of the report (it does get the title). This seems really basic, so I'm not sure what I might be missing.

joycekwc · August 29, 2020

Meraine - it depends a little on the web scraper used. For example, the Guardian has clearly identified itself as a news site. At one point I had submitted an ABC News scraper which fixed this issue but forgot about it - may get back in and see what happened to it.

adamsmith · August 29, 2020

To expand on this: There are two ways Zotero would recognize additional metadata such as author, date, publication:
1. The publication provides that information in a standardized format and
2. Someone writes dedicated import code for the publication

2) unfortunately also tends to break a fair amount, as news sites update their sites.

meraine · August 29, 2020

Thanks to you both -- yes please to the ABC news scraper! I am surprised at how messy this is overall. A small Australian media website article came up as a blog today. I guess I'm just going to have to add details manually, and when it comes to citation ... I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!