You also need to make sure your news is current. It can depend on what you are writing, for instance, old news could be useful in a history paper, but for the most part, you want your news to be as current as possible.
One of the main culprits in fake news is misreported news. Especially in a 24-hour news cycle, news organizations cannot help, but periodically make mistakes. They want to make sure that they are on top of any story and sometimes that means reporting on something before all the information is in. If the news outlet is lucky, then this turns out great. They get credit for breaking the story and all the organizations defer to them and reference them beefing up their numbers. But, if this goes wrong, then news outlets need to apologize for misrepresenting the news. And to their credit, news organizations usually do apologize publicly for the error. However, the false news story often gets much more publicity than the apology. As a result, some people never realize that the outlet retracted the story.
You need to make sure that you know all the most updated information on a story to make sure that it hasn't been disproved or redacted. Currency can mean the difference between accidentally referring to a fake news story or catching yourself before making a major mistake.
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