Find newspapers

Newspapers are great primary sources. We subscribe to many important current newspapers and archives - sometimes going back hundreds of years.

This guide gives you an overview of newspapers and news archives and what material they include.

If you're new to using newspapers as study resources and want to know how they can support your studies: check out the section on primary and secondary sources in our Library Research Skills Moodle module.

Newspaper archive collections

We subscribe to these major collections of newspaper archives. Each allows you to search across a large range of sources.

Gale Primary Sources: you can search content across 14 news collections and it has useful tools like:

term frequency: see how often your search term occurs over time
topic finder: see what other words and subjects are found most often in relation to your search term

Nexis: an excellent source for online full text UK newspapers, as well as other news sources world wide, You can filter by publication type, world region and language.

ProQuest: it's not obvious from the interface, but this includes the following historical newspaper archives:

Guardian and Observer
New York Times
Chicago Tribune
Los Angeles Times

UK Press Online: 3 million pages of 19th - 21st century newspapers:

best online source for archives of local Kent newspapers
includes a collection of UK news coverage during both World Wars

Historical Newspapers: provides a different way of searching The Times and The New York Times archives

Eighteenth Century Journals Portal: portal to newspapers and periodicals c1685-1835, covering all aspects of 18th-century social, political and literary life

19th Century U.S. Newspapers: full-text content and images from numerous newspapers from a range of urban and rural regions throughout the U.S., covering topics like the American Civil War, African-American culture and history, Western migration and Antebellum-era life

Useful free archives

British Pathé news archive: over 85,000 clips of historical footage from around the globe spanning 1896-1976
Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers (Library of Congress): search hundreds of full text newspapers from 1860-1922; the site also has information about American newspapers from 1690 onwards
News on Screen (from BUFVC): database of British newsreel and cinemagazine production from 1910 to 1983, with over 180,000 records and a large collection of digitised documents

Individual newspapers

Use Nexis to search the full text of current newspapers - it usually covers the last 2 or 3 decades.

You can also search for publications by title to check if we have online holdings.

Current papers with special access

Financial Times 1998-present (through ft.com) - includes FT special reports;

the first time you use this you need to create an account using your Kent email address (but not your Kent IT Account password)

The New York Times (current):

To access www.nytimes.com directly (for example if you find articles in searches), you can also create an account:

go to the Kent access pass page, click Create Account, use your Kent email address, but not your Kent password - in future you can go to www.nytimes.com and click Login

Times Higher Education (full access):

the first time you use this, you need to Register (top right) using your Kent email address. Do not use your Kent IT Account password. After that, you need to Login with your new credentials each time you visit.

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