What do you do when you need to research a topic and you don’t have access to the proprietary LexisNexis news-articles database? That question came up recently on an IRE listserv, and here are some of the answers.
“NewsBank’s NewsLibrary is reasonably priced for newspaper-article searches,” says Merrie Monteagudo from News Research and Archives at The San Diego Union-Tribune. “They don’t have the magazine or journals that LexisNexis has, and the search interface isn’t as slick, but it’s worth a look.
“You might also try an individual or corporate account from Dow Jones Factiva – which has the Wall Street Journal archives. With a pay-per-use account, there is a small annual fee for free searching and headlines, and you only pay a fee (about $3) for each full-text article that you pull.”
Jeremy Kohler, staff writer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, advises that a public library card in St. Louis County will get you access to Factiva. In some places, university libraries also will help.
