how will the information historian get from old newspapers different from that found in police report?
Answers
The nature of information that the historians get from old newspapers and police reports can be entirely different. Typically, a historian would collect information from a wide variety of sources that includes both official and unofficial documents. The police report comes from an administrative viewpoint and the types of details that we can obtain from them are often restricted.
A police report is strictly confined to the procedures and is concerned with record-keeping, rather than building a narrative. Journalism and reporting tools follow a different approach that might bring out the finer details about an event or a happening. Often police reports might oversee or neglect information that does not directly serve the function of law enforcement.
Being a mass media, newspapers provide more backdrop, context and elaborate descriptions. But the relative merits and accuracy of a piece of information from any source, can only be determined after proper research and investigation. For getting a balanced and clearer picture of a period in history, historians often go through as many sources as possible, while keeping in mind the biases and interests that could be behind them.
Information is essential for writing history of a time which can be gathered from various sources. Apart from official documents in the archives, historians gather information also from old newspapers, diaries of people, accounts of pilgrims, autobiographies of important personalities and booklets etc.
News papers provide accounts of the movements in different parts of the country. Information found in newspapers is varied, based on incidents that have happened across the country. They may be showcasing incidents based on the views and thinking of the correspondents, news editors etc.
Whereas, the police reports are true, pragmatic, limited and localized. Because of this fact, sometimes the information historians get from the old newspapers, are not as useful as it is from that found in police reports. However, for any incidence the newspaper may not quote all the reasons behind it and it would be biased as per the thinking of reporter while in police records we could find some evidences for an incident and unbiased reports.