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Most major newspapers, such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Sun-Tribune, digitize their old newspaper articles so that they can be accessed from any computer via the internet. Most of these newspaper companies, however, charge a subscription to access information from recent decades, making sporadic investigations of these newspapers costly. For example, the New York Times Article Archive offers free text-only reproductions of articles from before 1987, but to access articles from 1987 and beyond, or if you want PDF articles from 1922 and beyond, a $4-per-article or $16 subscription fee is charged.
Smaller newspapers, particularly local ones, sometimes digitize their archives, but not always. Instead, copies of the old newspapers are stored in an archive that may require you to travel to their offices or archives and request access to those older articles; generally the older the article and the smaller the newspaper, the more difficult it is to gain access to it. - Instead of paying subscription or access fees or traveling to the offices of the local paper, consider a visit to a state-run university's library and asking for a visitor access code. Most state-run universities and colleges have a quiet "open door" policy that allows citizens of the state who are not enrolled in the college or university to access the library's resources; the citizens pay the taxes that support the institution, after all. Make a call to the library and speak to the resources department or the head librarian and discuss your research plans; you will find that not only will you have access, you will have an expert on research on hand to guide you.
- There are some private companies, such as NewspaperArchive.com (see Resources below) which allow the private individual to access old newspaper articles. There is a fee involved in using services like NewspaperArchive, but it is typically cheaper than paying individual subscriptions to each newspaper company and may be a feasible alternative if your state-run university library is either too far away or will not grant you access to their archives.
- Some public libraries will have bound copies of old newspapers available in the periodicals section. Periodically, depending upon the newspaper in question, old articles are bound into book volumes sorted by year and date and are shelved in a manner similar to books. Increasingly, however, these volumes are being replaced by digital copies which--needless to say--take up very little room and are much cheaper. Consult your local public library about bound archival volumes for the newspaper you are hoping to use.
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If you are using these newspaper articles as a part of a scholarly work, you will need to know how to cite them properly. Newspaper articles are typically cited in "MLA" (Modern Language Association) format, but your research may have a different format required, such as Chicago Manual of Style (or simply "Chicago").
Nevertheless, the citation given by the newspaper article index will give you all the pertinent information; date, author/reporter, page and section number and news source, which may or may not be the newspaper itself (for example, it could be an Associated Press story that ran in a local paper).
