{"id":223,"date":"2017-05-19T21:23:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-19T21:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/finding-old-newspaper-articles\/"},"modified":"2020-03-17T19:53:26","modified_gmt":"2020-03-17T19:53:26","slug":"finding-old-newspaper-articles","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/finding-old-newspaper-articles\/","title":{"raw":"Finding Old Newspaper Articles","rendered":"Finding Old Newspaper Articles"},"content":{"raw":"While more recent news articles are available from both <em>Google<\/em>'s and <em>Bing<\/em>'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'll show you how to use news archives to check on the existence of articles at no cost.\n<h2>A Sample Problem<\/h2>\nPresident Trump claimed the investigation to see if his campaign had colluded with Russia was a \"witch hunt.\" No sooner had he said that than this snapshot of an article appeared in my feed:\n\n&nbsp;\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-219\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2017\/02\/dahzhxxumaazmnw-1.jpg\" alt=\"Newspaper article saying &quot;Nixon Sees Witch-hunt&quot; \" width=\"331\" height=\"416\">\n\n<a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_126a\">Figure 119<\/a>\n\nBy now you should know it's trivially easy to fake something that looks like a snapshot of an old headline. So how do we find out if this article actually ran?\n\nOur first instinct might be to go to the <em>Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0to 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 <em>Post<\/em>--the <em>Washington Post<\/em> doesn't tag it's own articles as coming from the \"<em>Washington Post<\/em>.\" This particular headline was run in another paper.\n\nSo we want to do a broad search across many historical American papers. When reporters do this, they most often use tools such as <em>LexisNexis<\/em> and <em>ProQuest<\/em>, which are usually unavailable to average people.\n\nWe'll have to make do with sources that are searchable from the web. There are three major web searchable archives in the U.S.:\n<ul>\n \t<li><em>Google's Historical Newspapers<\/em>:\u00a0news.google.com\/newspapers<\/li>\n \t<li><em>Newspapers.com<\/em>:\u00a0newspapers.com<\/li>\n \t<li><em>Newsbank's Newspaper Archive<\/em>:\u00a0newspaperarchive.com<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<em>Google<\/em> offers complete articles. The other two offer snippets unless you pay them money, but snippets are enough for this sort of task.\n\nSo we construct our search. It's just a variation on the \"site:\" syntax we've used elsewhere.\n<blockquote>Nixon Sees Witch Hunt (site:newspapers.com OR site:news.google.com\/newspapers OR site:newspaperarchive.com)<\/blockquote>\nAnd we get back a time-stamped result from the <em>LA Times<\/em>, with a date (in 1973) that looks promising:\n\n<img class=\"alignnone wp-image-220 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of search results with positive hit on story on top\" width=\"857\" height=\"578\">\n\n<a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_127a\">Figure 120<\/a>\n\nNote that \"Nixon sees witch-hunt Sears insiders say.\" What's that \"Sears\" bit about?\n\nIt becomes evident when we click through and look at the page:\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-221\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"365\" height=\"528\">\n\n<a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_128a\">Figure 121<\/a>\n\nYou can see above we've 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 as part of the headline.\n\nIf we scroll down the page, we can see enough to confirm that this article as I saw it in my feed was correct, even though the automatic character recognition has messed up a lot of the words:\n<blockquote>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 constitute a \"political witch-hunt,\" according to White House sources. The sources, said, that the President .in recent weeks had expressed bitterness and deep hostility toward the two-.morith-old proceedings.<\/blockquote>\nWe have enough here to say that this ran in the<em> LA Times<\/em> in July 1973. And if we really wanted to see a clean version of the article, we could subscribe to the service and grab a better image, which may be what the original tweeter did.\n<h2>Checking Cited Headlines<\/h2>\nHere's another paragraph, this time from the <em>New York Times<\/em>, that claims the <em>LA Times<\/em> ran a derogatory headline when the first female commercial pilot at a major airline got her wings.\n<blockquote>There were no female pilots at the biggest airlines until 1973, when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1973\/06\/10\/archives\/fly-me-means-fly-me-women-pilots-trends.html\">American Airlines hired the first, Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo<\/a>. In a reminder of how times have changed, that news was reported in The Los Angeles Times under the headline, \u201cAirline Pilot to Fly by Seat of Panties.\u201d<\/blockquote>\nThe <em>New York Times<\/em> is a very reliable paper, and in this case we probably don't need to check the article title. But let's try anyway with the same sort of search as above:\n<blockquote>Airline Pilot to Fly by Seat of Panties (site:newspapers.com OR site:news.google.com\/newspapers OR site:newspaperarchive.com)<\/blockquote>\nNote that because the optical character recognition sometimes transcribes things wrong, we don't put quotes around the search phrase, at least at first. When we put it in, we're in luck--we can see the headline in the blurb:\n\n<img class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-222\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"657\" height=\"345\">\n\n<a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_129a\">Figure 122<\/a>\n\nWe might also search for a type of headline. For instance, a key point of the critics of global warming is the statement that scientists in the 1970s feared \"global cooling\" instead of global warming; the point being that the global warming scare is one in a long series of bad guesses to be later thrown away. Can we compare the number of global cooling and global warming stories in the 1970s?\n\nWe execute a search for:\n<blockquote>global cooling (site:newspapers.com) 1975<\/blockquote>\nand we get an article from 1975, which talks of some sensationalist claims of a coming ice age. But when the reporter talks to a climatologist, the tone is different:\n<blockquote>But Lawson prefers to speak in terms of the following probabilities: \u2014In the long run, over thousands of years, there is probability of an ice age. \u2014In the next few decades, there is a probability of a warming trend. \u2014In the next few years, the probability is that global cooling will continue dbownward to 19th century levels.<\/blockquote>\n<em>(Note: For some reason newspaper archive searches react badly to date filters, which is why we just put 1975 in plain text.)<\/em>\n\nIf we search for \"global warming\" in 1975, we get this quote in the January 29, 1975 edition of the\u00a0<em>Orlando Sentinel<\/em> from a government scientist:\n<blockquote>\"After the next decade or so will come a warming trend, both because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and thermal pollution by power plants and so on. In the 21st century, man's activities will predominate over nature.\" J. Murray Mitchell, senior research climatologist, Environmental Data Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.<\/blockquote>\nWhile one would need much more evidence to settle the question of whether scientists on the whole feared global cooling or global warming in the 1970s, it's clear enough that many scientists expected warming due to man's activities even then. If you're looking at sharing an article that says that \"cooling\" was the big 1970s worry, you might want to sit on it before reposting.\n\n&nbsp;","rendered":"<p>While more recent news articles are available from both <em>Google<\/em>&#8216;s and <em>Bing<\/em>&#8216;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&#8217;ll show you how to use news archives to check on the existence of articles at no cost.<\/p>\n<h2>A Sample Problem<\/h2>\n<p>President Trump claimed the investigation to see if his campaign had colluded with Russia was a &#8220;witch hunt.&#8221; No sooner had he said that than this snapshot of an article appeared in my feed:<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-219\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2017\/02\/dahzhxxumaazmnw-1.jpg\" alt=\"Newspaper article saying &quot;Nixon Sees Witch-hunt&quot;\" width=\"331\" height=\"416\" srcset=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2017\/02\/dahzhxxumaazmnw-1.jpg 331w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2017\/02\/dahzhxxumaazmnw-1-239x300.jpg 239w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2017\/02\/dahzhxxumaazmnw-1-65x82.jpg 65w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2017\/02\/dahzhxxumaazmnw-1-225x283.jpg 225w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 331px) 100vw, 331px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_126a\">Figure 119<\/a><\/p>\n<p>By now you should know it&#8217;s trivially easy to fake something that looks like a snapshot of an old headline. So how do we find out if this article actually ran?<\/p>\n<p>Our first instinct might be to go to the <em>Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0to see if they have this article. That&#8217;s not a bad instinct, but in this case the headline clearly ran somewhere else other than the <em>Post<\/em>&#8211;the <em>Washington Post<\/em> doesn&#8217;t tag it&#8217;s own articles as coming from the &#8220;<em>Washington Post<\/em>.&#8221; This particular headline was run in another paper.<\/p>\n<p>So we want to do a broad search across many historical American papers. When reporters do this, they most often use tools such as <em>LexisNexis<\/em> and <em>ProQuest<\/em>, which are usually unavailable to average people.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll have to make do with sources that are searchable from the web. There are three major web searchable archives in the U.S.:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Google&#8217;s Historical Newspapers<\/em>:\u00a0news.google.com\/newspapers<\/li>\n<li><em>Newspapers.com<\/em>:\u00a0newspapers.com<\/li>\n<li><em>Newsbank&#8217;s Newspaper Archive<\/em>:\u00a0newspaperarchive.com<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>Google<\/em> offers complete articles. The other two offer snippets unless you pay them money, but snippets are enough for this sort of task.<\/p>\n<p>So we construct our search. It&#8217;s just a variation on the &#8220;site:&#8221; syntax we&#8217;ve used elsewhere.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Nixon Sees Witch Hunt (site:newspapers.com OR site:news.google.com\/newspapers OR site:newspaperarchive.com)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And we get back a time-stamped result from the <em>LA Times<\/em>, with a date (in 1973) that looks promising:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-220 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt.png\" alt=\"Screenshot of search results with positive hit on story on top\" width=\"857\" height=\"578\" srcset=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt.png 857w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt-300x202.png 300w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt-768x518.png 768w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt-65x44.png 65w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt-225x152.png 225w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/nixon-hunt-350x236.png 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 857px) 100vw, 857px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_127a\">Figure 120<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Note that &#8220;Nixon sees witch-hunt Sears insiders say.&#8221; What&#8217;s that &#8220;Sears&#8221; bit about?<\/p>\n<p>It becomes evident when we click through and look at the page:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-221\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"365\" height=\"528\" srcset=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline.png 365w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline-207x300.png 207w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline-65x94.png 65w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline-225x325.png 225w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/headline-350x506.png 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 365px) 100vw, 365px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_128a\">Figure 121<\/a><\/p>\n<p>You can see above we&#8217;ve circled the headline. The free version only offers this blurry &#8220;thumbnail&#8221; image of the page, but it&#8217;s enough to spot the headline. It also makes obvious where the &#8220;Sears&#8221; came from&#8211;the text here was automatically generated by computer and must have included the Sears ad next to as part of the headline.<\/p>\n<p>If we scroll down the page, we can see enough to confirm that this article as I saw it in my feed was correct, even though the automatic character recognition has messed up a lot of the words:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Part l-A-Sun., July 22, 1973 I Nixon Sees &#8216;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 &#8216;Watergate hearings are unfair and constitute a &#8220;political witch-hunt,&#8221; according to White House sources. The sources, said, that the President .in recent weeks had expressed bitterness and deep hostility toward the two-.morith-old proceedings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We have enough here to say that this ran in the<em> LA Times<\/em> in July 1973. And if we really wanted to see a clean version of the article, we could subscribe to the service and grab a better image, which may be what the original tweeter did.<\/p>\n<h2>Checking Cited Headlines<\/h2>\n<p>Here&#8217;s another paragraph, this time from the <em>New York Times<\/em>, that claims the <em>LA Times<\/em> ran a derogatory headline when the first female commercial pilot at a major airline got her wings.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>There were no female pilots at the biggest airlines until 1973, when <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1973\/06\/10\/archives\/fly-me-means-fly-me-women-pilots-trends.html\">American Airlines hired the first, Bonnie Tiburzi Caputo<\/a>. In a reminder of how times have changed, that news was reported in The Los Angeles Times under the headline, \u201cAirline Pilot to Fly by Seat of Panties.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The <em>New York Times<\/em> is a very reliable paper, and in this case we probably don&#8217;t need to check the article title. But let&#8217;s try anyway with the same sort of search as above:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Airline Pilot to Fly by Seat of Panties (site:newspapers.com OR site:news.google.com\/newspapers OR site:newspaperarchive.com)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Note that because the optical character recognition sometimes transcribes things wrong, we don&#8217;t put quotes around the search phrase, at least at first. When we put it in, we&#8217;re in luck&#8211;we can see the headline in the blurb:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-222\" src=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"657\" height=\"345\" srcset=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant.png 657w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant-300x158.png 300w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant-65x34.png 65w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant-225x118.png 225w, https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/app\/uploads\/sites\/80\/2020\/03\/pant-350x184.png 350w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 657px) 100vw, 657px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/chapter\/image-descriptions\/#figure_129a\">Figure 122<\/a><\/p>\n<p>We might also search for a type of headline. For instance, a key point of the critics of global warming is the statement that scientists in the 1970s feared &#8220;global cooling&#8221; instead of global warming; the point being that the global warming scare is one in a long series of bad guesses to be later thrown away. Can we compare the number of global cooling and global warming stories in the 1970s?<\/p>\n<p>We execute a search for:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>global cooling (site:newspapers.com) 1975<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>and we get an article from 1975, which talks of some sensationalist claims of a coming ice age. But when the reporter talks to a climatologist, the tone is different:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>But Lawson prefers to speak in terms of the following probabilities: \u2014In the long run, over thousands of years, there is probability of an ice age. \u2014In the next few decades, there is a probability of a warming trend. \u2014In the next few years, the probability is that global cooling will continue dbownward to 19th century levels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><em>(Note: For some reason newspaper archive searches react badly to date filters, which is why we just put 1975 in plain text.)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>If we search for &#8220;global warming&#8221; in 1975, we get this quote in the January 29, 1975 edition of the\u00a0<em>Orlando Sentinel<\/em> from a government scientist:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;After the next decade or so will come a warming trend, both because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere and thermal pollution by power plants and so on. In the 21st century, man&#8217;s activities will predominate over nature.&#8221; J. Murray Mitchell, senior research climatologist, Environmental Data Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>While one would need much more evidence to settle the question of whether scientists on the whole feared global cooling or global warming in the 1970s, it&#8217;s clear enough that many scientists expected warming due to man&#8217;s activities even then. If you&#8217;re looking at sharing an article that says that &#8220;cooling&#8221; was the big 1970s worry, you might want to sit on it before reposting.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"menu_order":14,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-223","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":152,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224,"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/223\/revisions\/224"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/152"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/223\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=223"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/webliteracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}