HON 1010/1020 Ideas, Innovation & Society: Find Newspaper Articles

Newspapers contain many types of content.

• Some content is 'reporting', which tends to be informative and factual and focus on the classic questions of Who, What, When, Where, How and (to a more limited extent) Why a particular event happened.  These may be written by local journalists or be reprinted from newswire services.
• Some content is longer 'features', which may be more general than event-based, but still desited to be informative, though often with a more narrative structure.
• Some cotent is 'opinion'.  These may be editorials written by the newspaper staff (often anonymously), letters to the editor, or commentary columns from local or well-known national columnists.  These take a stance and are intentionally reflective of a single opinion.

Try to determine what type of content you are looking at to get a better idea of what the author's purpose is: is it to inform, or to persuade, or to sell something?

Pay attention to whether multiple points of view are presented, and to see if attempts are made to provide a single explanation for the facts if they are unclear.  Also look to see who is interviewed or quoted in the piece, or ask yourself who perhaps should have been interviewed and wasn't?

Many newspaper and newswire websites have a Search function (often depicted with a magnifying glass icon near the top of the page).  But often this search function isn't the best, frankly.  Recent articles may be prioritized over relevant articles, for example, or their use of AND, OR, and quotation marks may or may not work the way you expect.

One workaround or 'hack' is to use the Google web indexing of the site to bring up relevant articles with your term.  The general way to do this is to use the format:

...where you use the basic website domain after the command site: (with a colon) and then your search terms or search phrases in quotation marks.

Domains include wire sites like:

• Site:apnews.com
• site:reuters.com
• or individual newspapers like: site:www.dispatch.com