How to check your own references: Which Website Type?

Webpages & News sites vs Blogs & Newpaper/Magazine articles

Distinguishing between types of sites can be very tricky and confusing as they need to be done slightly differently and are listed separately in our guide. Here is an easy way of remembering it.

General webpages and webpages on a news site are both webpages.   Therefore, they both follow the same format

Author. (date - in full if provided). Title. Website name. URL

Whereas, blog posts, newspaper articles and magazine articles are periodicals, i.e. they are published on a recurring basis. Therefore, they basically follow the same format as each other.

Author. (YYYY, Month DD). Title of the article/post in sentence case. Name of the blog/Newspaper/Magazine in Italic Title Case. URL

How to tell what is what?

• Blogs usually have an author, a specific date, other entries nearby, comments, and the word 'blog' somewhere on the page or in the URL.

• Newspapers/magazines and News Websites can be a bit tricky to tell apart and often need a bit of background knowledge.  A news site has generally always been either online or a news broadcaster (e.g. CNN), whereas online newspapers and magazines have evolved from a print publication (and can usually still be found in print). For example, "Stuff" is a news site and "The Waikato Times" is an online newspaper and "NZ Listener" is a magazine. 

There is often very little on the pages to distinguish between them (except perhaps your prior knowledge as to what they are), but typically a newspaper or magazine will have their branding everywhere, whereas a news site will often show the other news sources they got the story from;   a bit of digging in "About Us" or looking for terms like "editorial" or "subscription" may offer some clues, you may even need to Google what it is.  

• Webpages are usually hosted by a company or organisation and have a range of pages that are all related to that company/organisation and/or the topic they specialise in.