News Sources
News outlets of all kinds can be incredibly useful for academic research. Though these ‘non scholarly’ sources might not have the type of theory and in-depth research found in peer-reviewed articles, news media can give you an insight into public dialogue about an issue as well as data about when certain things happened.
Market researchers might find company information and market context, sociologists might find evidence of culture, and media researchers and historians can find out how different locations and organisations report on the same event. It can be incredibly interesting to see how an issue or event was discussed at the time it happened: was it front page news? What kinds of words or phrases were used? What kinds of advertisements ran next to it?
If you are thinking of researching your topic in the news, here are a few places to start:
Databases for News
- Global Newsstream This link opens in a new window
Global Newsstream enables users to search the most recent global news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s featuring newspapers, newswires, blogs, and news sites in active full- text format
Partner Staff Access
Log in directly on the Proquest (Global Newsstream) website. Click on ‘Login through your Library’ and choose ‘Institutional Login'. - British Library Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Sourced from the extensive holdings of the British Library,British Library Newspapersdelivers a wide range of irreplaceable local and regional voices to reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. These newspapers, emerging during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a crucial channel of information in towns and major cities, provide researchers with a unique, first-hand perspective on history. With more than 240 newspaper titles, the series is comprised of approximately 6.4 million pages of historic content, from articles to advertisements. This collection illuminates diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures
- Box of Broadcasts (BoB) This link opens in a new window
This link opens in a new window
BOB is an academically-focused system that allows staff and students, at subscribing institutions, to record programmes from over 75 free-to-air channels; and search an archive of over 3 million broadcasts.
Newspaper Research Tutorial - Using Newsstream
Other News websites
- News Websites (Library Reading Lists)
This list has a selection of UK and local news websites as well as a few ideas of where to look for non-UK sources. A great one on the list is the European Journalism Centre’s EUFeeds, which provides the top European headlines, and is updated every 20 minutes. - Google News ArchiveGoogle have digitised and made freely available a selection of 19th and 20th century newspapers, mostly from the United States but there are a few titles from other countries as well.
- Wayback MachineThe Internet Archive’s Wayback machine might not spring to mind when you need breaking news, but because it allows you to look at a website the way it appeared on the date it was saved, it can be a fascinating way to explore how the news looked on a certain day in time. If you’re researching a major event and want to see what it looked like in context, you might consider seeing how different news websites reported it on a certain day.