If your research focuses on a key term like "gun control" or "medical marijuana," you will have an easier time getting results on your topic from a database than if you visit each newspaper's website and search there.
Database searches also allow you to restrict results based on time period which is helpful for topics that focus on an era or time period. You can also restrict your results by region, language, or subject, which does a lot of the work for you before you even begin reading.
Databases will often not contain articles from small, local newspapers. When researching a small region, like a rural farming town, looking for that area's newspaper can be valuable.
It is also important to remember that not all newspapers have the same quality standards of journalism. The newspaper article that comes up in your database search could be more of a gossip tabloid publication. These casual, gossip publications are easy to spot when you visit the website directly because they are full of celebrity news, photos, and baiting headlines that turn out not to be accurate when you read the piece.
Click the News & Media box to jump to the section of the databases that are categorized especially for News & Media. Many of the databases include newspapers even if they are not specialized for this purpose.
