Speaker 1: Stephanie joins us now on set. Stephanie Gosk is following this. NBC's Stephanie Gosk is here with more. Hey, Steph, good morning. I always joke around with people that this is really the only job that I could ever have because I'm such a procrastinator. I would never get anything done. And if you don't get it done in this job, you get fired. Hi, I'm Stephanie Gosk, a correspondent with NBC News. Welcome to NBCU Academy. This was a rough place. This was a rough place. Could you have imagined having a space like this? No, not at all. But that feels kind of disturbing to me. Am I just a boomer? No, you're just somebody who probably does a lot of writing and reading for a living. When I'm given an assignment, I will immediately look to see if there are any articles out there about the story. I'm asking myself, how did they learn this information? Who did they hear it from? Is it accurately sourced? When you're thinking about a primary source, you need to think about the origin of the information. Where did the information come from? You want to get to that source. You want to talk to the person who saw it. You want to read the report or the study. Talk to the person who wrote the study. Now, a secondary source is a step removed. In other words, someone has taken that primary source, that information, and translated it somehow. Maybe has written an article or has heard something someone has said. And it is inherently less reliable. But that doesn't mean that secondary sources aren't important and helpful. I use secondary sources all the time. And we're really judicious at NBC News about how we use them and when we use them. As an example, there may be a report in the New York Times, something that's generating a lot of talk and a lot of buzz and is certainly something that is actually the report itself, the article itself, is making news. And so that really is a secondary source. We will also cite the secondary source and also be very transparent with our viewers that we don't have this reporting ourselves. There are analysts who say it'll be the most lucrative drug ever made. Hyperbole? Probably. You also always have to think about what the source's agenda and motivation is for telling you what they're telling you. A pharmaceutical company put out a press release. They were developing a drug for Lyme's disease. They put out this press release and immediately a lot of news organizations ran with it. You know, there's going to be a new drug for Lyme's disease. It's going to be really great. And it all sounds really great. Except that when you go to the actual press release, way down at the bottom, it talks about the fact that they don't have the people for the trial, that it's only the first trial, that realistically they're not looking at an approval for this drug for years and years and years. All the headlines that were out there made it sound like it was going to happen tomorrow. So the press release, you have to think about the motivation for sending it out. Obviously, a pharmaceutical company that's telling you about it has its own self-interest in mind. Do your homework. Get the press release. Make sure you have it. And don't just read the first two paragraphs. Read the full press release. And that means doing your homework and making sure you see all the details. Did you find that there was a lot of stuff in your room that was a little distracting? Yeah, I bet. What I love are the conversations that I have with people. Sitting down with someone I never would have met otherwise, learning about them and taking something away. Not only telling their story, but having their story change my perspective on life.