News Sources

What’s different or special about searching in newspapers?

They include a range of content types

• In some databases you can limit your search to specific types of newspaper articles (eg. opinion pieces). Check out this guide for search tips on the different types of newspaper articles (from Williams University).

Article headlines may vary between different editions

• Sometimes the exact same article may be published under one headline in the print edition of the newspaper and a completely different headline in the online edition.
• Sometimes the byline (name) of the journalist shown for the same article may also differ between editions.

Language tends to be more informal/conversational

• You may need to search for names and phrases using alternative names, nicknames, abbreviations, initials
• Search for events and places if a person's name doesn't give you results. Not everyone's name will be mentioned in a news story.

Article text searching can sometimes be problematic

• Many newspaper databases don't provide abstracts (summaries) or subject headings so you have to rely purely on keyword searching within the body of the article text. This can mean you might get very large search results that you might find hard to narrow with additional keywords. Try applying filters such as Publication Name(s) or Date(s) that you can narrow initial results with more easily
• Use quotation marks around names, phrase, titles of news articles to focus your search e.g. "sydney harbour bridge"
• Browse newspaper issues around the relevant time period - the poor image reproduction quality and optical character recognition scanning technology for many early digitised newspapers sometimes makes it impossible to pick up specified search terms within the text.
• When looking for older news items on specific events/dates be aware that some newspapers were only published weekly or twice weekly, so you might need to widen your relevant day/week/month search date range.