This article was written and illustrated by Alex Manley for a student newspaper in the early 2010s at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. What is its thesis or controlling idea?
It's a good example of a source that you can learn a lot from, but is not at all scholarly. One way you can tell is the brevity of paragraphs. If you're reading a text in which almost every paragraph is three or fewer sentences, you are likely in the presence of journalism. This is not a bad thing, it's just not scholarship. Scholarly articles and essays will have longer paragraphs and their sources will be accurately cited. That said, they might be dated. Reading an article about the early internet in the 1980s could be interesting if you are taking a historical approach, but it will tell you next to nothing about the internet in the 2020s.
Technically, if a source text doesn't have footnotes and acknowledged secondary sources, then it isn't considered scholarly. However, if you wanted to highlight the subject position of the author (the fact that he or she was a college student in 2012), then it might be acceptable, as long as you explained why. The same is true for other sources that I call "gray research". For instance, if you find a source on JSTOR it is de facto scholarly. Essentially this means that it has been vetted by authorities (house readers and editors). If you find a source on an anonymous website that also has lots of pictures of cute cats and fail videos, then, umm, you are definitely not in the world of either "gray research" or scholarly research.
However, that leaves a lot in the middle. That's where your judgment comes in. Examine what kind of evidence is provided. Is it all logos (reason & argument) or all pathos (emotion & feeling)? There should be a balance. For a very long time our collective culture has valued logos more than pathos, but this might be changing.
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