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Making the Most of Web 2.0 (Reboot): News Sources Part I

Yes, you can sometimes make the sites you surf on the web part of your research. This guide explains how.

News Sources Part I

Making the Most of Web 2.0 -- News Sources Part I

Most quality newspaper writing is locked behind paywalls. Fortunately, you can still access that work by finding its titles, and searching for them in News and Newspapers . The guide handout, Step by Step with News and Newspapers explains how to find and read otherwise paywalled material.

The Guardian The Guardian is one of the few newspapers still freely available on the web. It requires a free registration, but articles appear to be unlimited. Select Columnists under Opinion for a list of all writers and their recent work.

538 ABC News Logo 538 covers political news with charts and graphs. Since ABC sponsors it, its stories are credible.

For top level writing on world affairs, social policy, economics, politics, and more, try the New York Times' news as well as its Opinion Pages, though it may take nearly a day for them to arrive in the database.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution Atlanta Journal-Constitution offers local news, features, and an opinion section. You need to turn off your ad-blocker, and there is a paywall. Fortunately, News and Newspapers carries most of the AJC's material, though sometimes under other publications' (syndicators') names. Both the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post feature paywalled columns, but you can find the full articles by searching titles in News and Newspapers too.

Finally, you can find interesting articles in the Wall Street Journal and actually read them by searching for their titles in the ProQuest Wall Street Journal database.

Magazines

Pretty DotDash Meridith Logo Time , Slate , Salon , and the The Daily Beast still offer mostly free content about both news and popular culture, and the DotDash Meredith family of magazines offer content about home, beauty, and technology, as well as consumer titles you sometimes see in supermarkets or drug stores. To find the magazines, click a category under Brands and then choose a title. If you are unsure about an article's writer's background, clicking author names often yields a helpful biography. Psychology Today is also available for free.

The Atlantic!

The Atlantic covers news and popular culture in depth, with credible long-form articles. Alas, The Atlantic has a fairly limited paywall. The good news is you can still read it for free by:

  • copying their titles.
  • pasting them into the big Discover Box on the library web page and adding "quotes."
  • Searching for them.
  • If necessary, clicking on the links to reach the full text.

A large proportion of The Atlantic's articles appear only on its website, rather than in print. A semi-secret database (Not visible under Databases A-Z) called Newsbank now offers these articles, but also comes with extra links.