A primary source is the original record of an event, created by the party the event actually happened to or the authority that governs it: a filing, a notice, a dataset, a contract. A secondary source is something written about that record afterward, a news article, a summary, a forum post, standing between the reader and the original document. Neither is automatically more trustworthy in every respect, a good secondary source adds context a primary filing doesn’t state, but a primary source has one property a secondary one structurally can’t: it’s the record itself, not somebody’s account of it, which means it can’t misquote itself, drop a caveat the original had, or carry an error introduced by whoever wrote about it afterward.
Every fact this site reports about filings and notices has a primary source a reader can open directly, and checking it takes the same handful of steps every time. For anything about a public company, that’s SEC EDGAR, the commission’s own filing system. Its search tools let a reader look up a specific company’s full filing history by name, ticker or CIK number, or run a full-text search for a keyword across, in the SEC’s own description, “more than 20 years of EDGAR filings,” filtered by date, company or filing category. A claim about what a specific Form 8-K, 10-Q or merger filing says is checkable in minutes this way: find the company, find the filing, read the actual document rather than a description of it.
Layoff reporting works the same way, through a different regulator for each layer of government involved. The federal WARN Act itself is described directly on the Department of Labor’s own site, which states the coverage threshold plainly: employers with 100 or more employees, and 60 days’ written notice ahead of a plant closing at one site or a mass layoff there, the latter meaning at least 50 employees who make up a third of that site’s workforce, or 500 or more employees whatever the share. States that go beyond the federal floor publish their own records, and not every state publishes them the same way; Texas is a useful example precisely because its data lives in an open, structured dataset published directly by the Texas Workforce Commission, rather than a database that has to be requested or scraped from a page built for humans to read one notice at a time. A claim about a specific WARN filing is checkable, whichever state is disclosing it, against that state’s own published record rather than taken on a news article’s word.
Checking a primary source yourself is also the only reliable way to catch a mismatch that a secondary account might carry without noticing it did. A WARN notice names a legal employer, which is very often a parent or holding company rather than the internal studio brand a player would recognize by name; a secondary report that states a specific studio was the one who filed, rather than the legal entity that actually appears on the notice, has added information the primary document doesn’t contain. Opening the notice itself, rather than trusting a headline’s phrasing, is the only way to see that gap directly. The same discipline applies to a merger filing naming an acquiring and target company, an 8-K citing a specific item number, or a state’s own open dataset listing a notice’s filing date: the primary document is the actual record either supports what’s being claimed about it, or it doesn’t, and reading it yourself is the only way to know which.