Activity 21-Newspapers

Blogging Exercise for This Activity

Search the Minnesota Newspapers database for a recent news event or a famous local name. Browse an issue of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press for any date in the last year. Try printing and/or emailing some articles.

I have used MN Newspapers quite a bit, but haven't used it lately and I'm glad I looked at it because I hadn't realized all the changes. I know there is a note about it at the end of the activity and a link to a video, but it's hard to watch videos when you are at the desk so I'm glad I looked at it. It's interesting to see the world reports and hot topics..I was a little confused by the USA-MN link-I thought this was a new newspaper, but it is a link to the MN newspapers covered by Newsbank. I didn't realize somehow that it links to some national magazines too. It is neat that you can now click on a year, month date, to pull up an issue...this is great as before you were limited to searching by keywords and dates and this graphic way of pulling up a date is a nice option.

Here's an article that I found. 'Wild' author Cheryl Strayed has deep, emotional roots in Minnesota; St. Paul Pioneer Press (MN); October 26, 2014

Find the New York Times for your birthday. What’s the headline? Is there any other interesting news? (Alternately, look up an important date in history and read the news as it happened.)

Well, I searched the date of my birth and then typed in "headline" and this is what I came up with. Hmmm...I don't know what to think of this. I can't tell which one is the main headline. I found a libguide on using Proquest New York Times and it talks about using "front page" to narrow down your search for headlines so that's what I did.  Here's the news about the Titanic.


Browse Chronicling America. Take a look at some newspapers from 100 years ago today.

Browse the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub for older state newspapers. Try browsing by county or using the map search features.

I like that you can see which issues there are for each county/city either by browsing or looking at the map. The text version of the paper seems hard to read, but if you click on print/view pdf then it gives you the option to enlarge which helps with being able to make the paper more legible.


Write a blog post about your experiences. See above. I think we have some good resources. It will take some more playing around to get used to and appreciate what there is and figure out how to work the quirks.

Thanks for this chance to learn and explore. Happy Holidays!

Here's an obituary from December 1970!