Finding Newspapers Online

Posted on March 2, 1998

What do most journalists want to read on the web? What other journalists are writing. Newspaper and magazine web sites remain one of the most popular sites.

With thousands of newspapers and news services out there, how do you find what you're looking for. In this column, we'll look at how to find papers, how to find fast news and how to find past news.

NEWSPAPER LISTINGS

But say you don't even know the name of the newspaper you're looking for - you just know you need to know how what's making headlines in Bangkok or Johannesburg.

Try one of the several excellent newspaper listings.

My favourite is AJR , the American Journalism Review. For American and Canadian papers, you can browse by state or province. For Europe and the other continents, you can click on the country you want. The links are usually up to date and easy to read. This is usually the first place I go when I am looking for a newspaper that is not on JournalismNet already.

The best search form for 11,000 American and Canadian newspapers is on the Columbia Journalism Review's : just type in a name of the paper and you'll get its web site and other details such as a snail mail address, the publisher, and phone numbers.

Other newspaper directories include Editor & Publisher and News Central

FINDING IT FAST

One of the most frequent questions I get during my Net training courses is: where can I find breaking news?  Check out my new page, Fast News.

If you're in a newsroom and have access to the wires, stick to that old method - the wires are still faster if you have a paid feed into your terminals than on the web.

Still, most of the wire services also provide good web services. For Canadian news, the CP wires move with a 20 minute delay on the Canoe site.  The good thing about this site is you can pick your preference - World, Business, National, and Regional. There is also a hit-and-miss search page .

French news in Canada comes from La Presse Canadienne. Good, fast world news in French is also available directly through AFP.

AP updates are available within minutes  and you can even click and get a Java news ticker running on your desktop.

FINDING IT PAST

Another big frustration of web surfers is finding yesterday's news. Most newspapers have their current issue on the web. How can you find out what they were saying last week, last month or last decade?

In Canada, you can't. Well, that's not entirely true. The Toronto Star has the best archive so far -completely searchable going back a few months. The Ottawa Citizen  also has a decent search function. Most other papers offer only a week or so; the Montreal Gazette  goes back two months. . But they are listed by dates, cannot be searched and feature texts only from their often incomplete web editions.

Maybe Canadian papers will eventually catch up to their web counterparts south of the cyberspace border. The major American newspapers - even small dailies - offer excellent, searchable archives for free or at a low cost.

You can hunt through the Boston Globe back to 15 years ago for free and pay only $2.00 US per article. Washington Post is completely searchable (along with the AP wires) for two weeks for free and then the same price structure as the Globe.

The Knight-Ridder chain offers a similar service.

British papers such as the Telegraph offer a free, four year database. The Times  has no search but if you know the date you can retrieve an entire edition going back years.

For a list of other archives available, check out my News Archives page.

SEARCHING NEWS

Finally, can you search the web just for newspaper articles? In other words, say you want the latest news on "death penalty" but you don't want wonky, personal web pages, just mainstream news sources. Traditional search engines such as AltaVista or Directories like Yahoo can't narrow in only on newspapers.

Finally, there are now several ways of doing this -- check them out on my Search News page.

The best is News Index.  Also try Northern Light Current News search

An excellent news clipping service is Excite NewsTracker . Unfortunately, it has little Canadian news, but it does hunt through 300 American and European news sources.

NewBot, from the folks at HotWired, is a search software you download (for free) and install on your desktop. Punch in the words and it will track down the latest articles - again, mainly American.

And has a search box on its page which allows you to select newspapers and wire services.