User:Chew/essays/Citing Newspapers.com Clips

Newspapers.com is a newspaper archival service owned by Ancestry.com. It is also accessible to members of The Wikipedia Library as a service to access as well.

This essay will show you how to properly create and cite clips on Newspapers.com.

Why cite clips?

In order to access every page on the service, you need one of their two subscriptions. People often cite image or newspages links, in fact, they've cited them over 25,000 times. Doing this is bad, for many reasons.

When citing an image link to newspapers.com, it requires the user to have one of the subscription plans, or to be a member of the Wikipedia library. This isn't too uncommon, many popular news sites like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others require a subscription to view most articles. But, this is different. Users typically try to archive the image link to get around the subscription, but it does not archive properly and overall is very useless. However, there is a simple solution.

What is clipping?

One of the main features of the service is article clipping. There have been some issues with clipping, such as having to clip two times if the article spans two pages, which is very common in newspapers, but there are ways around that (see below).

Anyone with a subscription, or otherwise access e.g. through the library, can clip an article. This has several benefits over just citing the image link:

1. Anyone can access clip links. Unlike image links, you do not need a subscription to view clips. Here's an example of a clipped link. If you are signed out, you'll notice a "Freeview: Enjoy this clipping for free" hat on the top of the page.
2. It can be archived. Unlike the dynamic and impossible-to-archive image links, clip pages are static, making them easier to archive. Here's an example from archive.today. Here's an example from the Wayback Machine.
3. If a non-subscribing user wants to view the full page from a clip, they can simply click on the clip image to view the entire page for free. However, they do need to make an account, but they do not need to subscribe.

Creating clips

First, find the article you want to clip. Whether you're researching or migrating image links to clips, here's what you do.

Note: steps 3 and 4 are only necessary if you're using my auto-citing tool below, if you are doing everything manually, you don't need to do these, but it is still recommended!

1. Once you find the article, click "Clip" in the top right.
2. Drag the corners of the box to match just the article. Sometimes, the article is not a perfect rectangle, or spans two pages.
3. Enter the title of the article in the "title" box.
4. In the description, do the following:
   1. If there is an author, write on its own line: "By Firstname Lastname"
   2. If it is syndicated (e.g. says AP or UPI), add "Syndicated by [agency]" on its own line.
5. Click "Save"

Now you're done! Right click the title of the clip or view clip and copy that URL to take the URL and get ready to cite it.

Citing clips

When citing a newspapers.com clip, the auto citer in the VisualEditor does not cite newspapers.com links properly. It uses the {{Cite web}} template instead of the superior and preferred {{Cite news}}.

Automatically formatting citation from a clip

I have made a tool to create a fully formatted clip like seen above from a URL. If you've followed the steps to format it properly, see #Creating clips, it will automatically fill in the author, agency, and other information. Paste this into your editor and you'll be good to go!

If you want to do it manually, or learn what the citation is actually composed of, see below.

Citing a single page

Here's how to cite a newspapers.com clip properly. Take, for instance, this clip.

Here's what a proper citation looks like: Cour, Jim (May 15, 1994). "Salmon smoking, stroking hits at record clip during tear". The Desert Sun. Palm Springs, California. Associated Press. p. B2. Retrieved December 8, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.

Let's break it down:

Section of Template	Description
{{Cite news	Opening template
| last=Cour	The last name of the author, if there is one.
| first=Jim	The first name of the author, if there is one.
| date=1994-05-15	The publish date of the article. Can be formatted as shown if a date template is present, as it will be re-formatted to match the article's template, but you can also write it out properly.
| title=Salmon smoking, stroking hits at record clip during tear	The title of the article in the paper.
| url=https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-desert-sun-salmon-smoking-stroking/157929440/	The URL to the clip
| access-date=2024-12-08	The access date, aka, the current date of you citing it. This, in theory, should be UTC, but it can also be your time zone. The parsing of dates also applies here, too.
| work=The Desert Sun	The name of the newspaper.
| page=B2	The page number. We explicitly use page instead of pages because the pages parameter automatically parses numbers properly, but since newspaper pages often have letters, such as this example, will improperly label it as "pp. B2" instead of simply "p. B2." If you end up citing multiple pages, see below. If you notice, newspapers.com reports this page as 16. The page numbers are inaccurate prior to digital archives, so search on the page near the top to verify the page number and cite that instead of what newspapers.com provides.
| publication-place=Palm Springs, California	This is where the newspaper is published. It is not required if the name of the place is in the newspaper. For example, do not put the publication place for the New York Times, since it is obviously from New York.
| via=[[Newspapers.com]]	This adds a "– via Newspapers.com." to the end of the citation to indicate where it came from.
| agency=Associated Press	Since this article was syndicated by the Associated Press, we must indicate the agency that reported it.
}}	Closing template.

Citing multiple pages

Citing multiple pages is similar to citing single pages. You must make a clip of the articles on each page, then cite the page parameter like so:

|pages=[https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-miami-news-beachs-new-ballpark-no/156334032/ 1C], [https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-miami-news-beachs-new-ballpark-no/156334012/ 3C]

Which would render it like so:

Fitzgerald, Tommy (April 6, 1967). "Beach's New Ballpark: No Room For Crowds". The Miami News. pp. 1C, 3C. Retrieved December 12, 2024 – via Newspapers.com.

Note that we use the "pages" parameter here since we have multiple pages.