44 Finding Old Newspaper Articles
While more recent news articles are available from both Google‘s and Bing‘s news search tabs, older news can be more difficult to retrieve. Many options for retrieving old news entail paying a subscription fee or per article cost, which is a bit expensive for a person just checking up on a story. In this section, we will show you how to use news archives to check on the existence of articles at no cost.
A Sample Problem
President Trump claimed the investigation to see if his campaign had colluded with Russia was a “witch hunt.” Shortly afterward, this snapshot of an article appeared in a news feed:
By now you should know it is easy to fake something that looks like a snapshot of an old headline. So how do we find out if this article actually ran?
Our first instinct might be to go to the Washington Post to see if they have this article. That’s not a bad instinct, but in this case the headline clearly ran somewhere else other than the Post. The Washington Post does not tag its own articles as coming from the “Washington Post.” This particular headline ran in another paper.
So we want to do a broad search across many historical American papers. When reporters do this, they most often use tools such as LexisNexis and ProQuest, which are usually unavailable to average people.
We will have to make do with sources that are searchable from the web. There are three major web searchable archives:
- Google’s Historical Newspapers: news.google.com/newspapers
- Newspapers.com: newspapers.com
- Newsbank’s Newspaper Archive: newspaperarchive.com
Google offers complete articles. The other two offer snippets unless you pay them money, but snippets are enough for this sort of task.
So we construct our search. It is just a variation on the “site:” syntax we’ve used elsewhere.
Nixon Sees Witch Hunt (site:newspapers.com OR site:news.google.com/newspapers OR site:newspaperarchive.com)
And we get back a time-stamped result from the LA Times, with a date (in 1973) that looks promising:
Note the column on the left says, “Nixon sees witch-hunt Sears insiders say.” Why does the word, “Sears” appear there?
It becomes evident when we click through and look at the page:
You can see above we have circled the headline. The free version only offers this blurry “thumbnail” image of the page, but it’s enough to spot the headline. It also makes obvious where the “Sears” came from. The text here was automatically generated by computer and must have included the Sears ad next to it as part of the headline.
If we scroll down the page, we can see enough to confirm that this article was correct, even though the automatic character recognition has messed up a lot of the words:
Part l-A-Sun., July 22, 1973 I Nixon Sees ‘Witch-Hunt; Sears Insiders Say Prices Effective through Tuesday, July 24 BY BOB WOODWARD and CARL BERNSTEIN Thft Washington Post WASHINGTON President Nixon and his top aides believe that the Senate ‘Watergate hearings are unfair and consti