Research Guides: ARHU 158I: How To Panic Productively: News Sources

How To Use News Sources

News sources -- including online-only articles, magazines, and news sites -- are good places to find news, commentary, and reviews about your text. News articles are usually written soon after a text is "published," but sometimes people will write commentary about something in the years that follow, too.

Use news sources to...

Find examples of how people are talking, thinking, and feeling about your text.
Find news coverage of your text's public release, including how it was received by the public.
Get ideas for other keywords or angles you could use in your search.

Find Recent News Content

If your text was created recently or in the past few decades, you'll probably find more news, media narratives, commentary, and reviews in these places.

Google News
Search engine that links to articles and videos from thousands of online news outlets, including both major and local sources (as well as some less reliable sites). Useful for finding news, "thinkpieces," and reviews about your text, including ones from sources not included in the databases below.
- Tip: Click the arrow on the right side of the search box at the top to access advanced search options.
- Note: Many of the linked articles are subscriber-only. For content from major newspapers, search publication names and article titles in the library databases listed above to access full-text versions.
New York Times Access Pass
Every student at UMD now has full access to the New York Times website, for free. (This includes Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, and the Athletic.) Set up your account at the link.
Nexis Uni (LexisNexis)
Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic) is a large database of news, legal, and business information. It includes full-text news articles from major U.S. and some international newspapers (1970s - present). Visit our Nexis Uni guide for tips and tutorials. Nexis Uni includes articles from the New York Times and Baltimore Sun, but not the Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Most content is text only.

National Newspapers Core
Full-text articles from major U.S. newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Sun (Baltimore), and The Washington Post. Covers national, international and local news. Includes the NYT Book Review and NYT Magazine, which might be useful for finding reviews and commentary on your topic.

Ethnic NewsWatch (ProQuest)
Ethnic NewsWatch is a collection of "ethnic media" publications – newspapers, magazines, and journals published by and for people from marginalized racial, ethnic, religious, immigrant, and diasporic communities. The collection includes more than 2.5 million articles from over 300 historical and current periodicals (1959 - present), plus scholarly articles. The majority of content comes from African, African American, Arab American, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Caribbean, Eastern European, Hispanic and Latino, Jewish, Middle Eastern, and Native American publications based in the U.S. and Canada. Most articles are in English, but around 25% are in Spanish.
Independent Voices (JSTOR)
Full-text, full-color digitized scans of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced from the 1950s to the 2010s (with a few more recent publications) by feminists, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists and dissident GIs, Black Power advocates, Latino and Chicano Movement activists, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press, and alternative literary magazines.

Major U.S. Newspapers: Find the Baltimore Sun, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and Chicago Tribune

Historical Newspapers

If your text is more historical, you might find more historical media narratives and commentary in these databases.

Historical Newspapers databases (ProQuest)
Search full-text historic content from 28 major U.S. newspapers, including several African American and Jewish periodicals. Each newspaper has its own separate database, and each database contains several publications (different editions of the same paper). This link defaults to searching all of them at once. Tips:
- Click Change Databases at the top to select which ProQuest newspaper databases to search.
- Once in a specific newspaper's database, click Publications at the top to see which editions are included.
Click to view the full list of available papers and date ranges covered.
[BNP] = Historical Black/African American newspapers
[JNP] = Historical Jewish newspapers
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- American Hebrew & Jewish Messenger (1857-1922) [JNP]
- American Israelite (1854-2000) [JNP]
- Atlanta Constitution (1868-1945)
- Atlanta Daily World (1931-2003) [BNP]
- Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988) [BNP]
- Baltimore Sun (1837-1989)
- Boston Globe (1872-1979)
- Chicago Defender (1909-1975) [BNP]
- Chicago Tribune (1849-1986)
- Christian Science Monitor (1908-2001)
- Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1991) [BNP]
- Detroit Free Press (1831-1922)
- Hartford Courant (1764-1984)
- Jerusalem Post (1932-2008) [JNP]
- Jewish Advocate (1905-1990) [JNP]
- Jewish Exponent (1887-1990) [JNP]
- Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005) [BNP]
- Los Angeles Times (1881-1986)
- New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993) [BNP]
- New York Times (1851-2021)
- New York Tribune (1841-1922)
- Norfolk Journal and Guide (1916-2003) [BNP]
- Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001) [BNP]
- Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002) [BNP]
- San Francisco Chronicle (1865-1922)
- St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1874-1922)
- Wall Street Journal (1889-1997)
- Washington Post (1877-1998)
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress)
Chronicling America contains millions of newspaper pages from nearly every state and territory in the United States published through 1963. Cultural heritage institutions apply for and receive awards to select and digitize newspaper pages representing the history, geographic coverage, and events of note for their state or territory.
More historical newspaper & periodical databases
We subscribe to over 60 historical newspaper archives. Many historical newspapers have been preserved and digitized in scattered batches, so you may find content in multiple places and formats.

ARHU 158I: How To Panic Productively

How To Use News Sources

Use news sources to...

Find Recent News Content

Related pages

Historical Newspapers