• To learn basic skills for effective research, try the online tutorial LILO. This was designed by the University of Hawai‘i Libraries Information Literacy Committee.

• With whatever search engine you happen to be using, record your search terms. Write down the words or phrases you typed into the online search field. Until you find what you need, continuously monitor all details of your search. Successively modify your search strategy, noticing which combinations are — and are not — productive until you are successful.

• Unless one believes that all "free" commercial search engines disclose financial deals that favor their advertisers' databases, protect yourself against excessively narrow search results by using more than one search engine.

• The Metacrawler Advanced Search lets you search by "any" or "all" of words in your search field or even to search them as a "phrase." Of these three, the "any" search is the broadest. And the "phrase" search is the narrowest.

• A Metacrawler Advanced Search also does the following:

1. Allows Boolean searches — linking your search terms with conjunctions "and," "or" or "and/not."
2. Allows searches in eleven languages.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• Read and complete the self-guided Basics of Google Search orientation.

• Next, search a phrase and combine other search elements by using the Google Advanced Search. It lets the user make four important choices:

1. Search a phrase combined with other search elements.
2. Direct the search engine to the element of a Web document that you wish to search — its title, URL, text, hyperlinks, or all of these.
3. Select time periods for results during the past three months, six months, one year or anytime.
4. Specify any of 30 specific languages. Otherwise, the default is "any language."

• As a back-up, Ask Jeeves, or Find Articles.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• Search the H-Net Online database of vetted discussions and announcements in the humanities and social sciences.

• Instead of exposing yourself to embarrassment with unreliable and irresponsibly vetted Wikipedia articles, use the peer-reviewed Scholarpedia. Eugene M. Izhikevich is the editor.

• A customized WebCrawler search pulls results from several different popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves About, LookSmart, Overture Teoma, and FindWhat.

• WebCrawler's Advanced Search is helpfully selective. With less precision, WebCrawler also searches digital images.

• Use the Phrase Finder to track down the origins of hard-to-find catchy expressions used by politicians, writers and activists in social movements.

• And try Scirus to search citations to specific authors of articles.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting analyzes bias and censorship in newspapers, radio and TV.

• To learn about news stories not covered well by the mainstream U.S. press, visit Project Censored. Although Project Censored usually provides a public service, it sometimes imprecisely asserts censorship when the facts support a judgement of "deliberately ignored" or "underreported."

• The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other intelligence agencies have tried to force search engine managers to reveal who searched for what kinds of information. For one discussion of this practice, read Katie Hafner, "Internet Users Thinking Twice Before a Search," The New York Times, 25 January 2005.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• For "news you won't find on CNN or FoxNews," view provocative video documentaries and read reports from Information Clearing House.

• Wikileaks "is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the west who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their own governments and corporations.....We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources."

• A majority of links on Pollard's web pages will take you to more incisive news coverage than usually found in mainstream, allegedly neutral and "objective" American print and electronic news media.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• Begin at Hamilton Library's political science homepage.

• Information and analysis on the open Internet are often inferior to what you can find more easily in Hawai‘i Voyager. In Hawai‘i Voyager's Basic Search or Guided Search, utilize powerful "Subject Heading" searches. These link the user to every book, journal or video classified under the same Subject Heading(s). Once you have located an online record for any library item that you know is relevant, click on its Subject Heading(s).

• Use Hawai‘i Voyager's Internet Reference and Subject Resources to get citations, abstracts and full texts of articles.

• Yahoo! Political Science deserves your attention.

• High-quality content on a broad range of topics is searchable on the WWW Virtual Library. For example, the Hawai‘i politics and Chinese cultures abroad projects on Vincent Pollard's website are officially part of the WWW Virtual Library.

• The Google Advanced Scholar Search lets users fine-tune desired time periods for citations of authors.

• To search images, visit Metacrawler. Or try Yahoo! Advanced Image Search.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

Valuable resources. About two dozen daily U.S. newspapers profoundly influence national and regional print media and electronic mass communications media. The influence of these newspapers partly derives from who reads them — elites and interested publics. Also, their reports and editorials often are reprinted in other newspapers, and reporting, coverage and journalism that television reporting. With retrospective conversion, the earliest periods covered by some of these newspapers predate the World Wide Web by anywhere from ten years to one hundred and fifty years.

Save money by combining online & microfilm searches. Many online newspapers require that you subscribe, although subscriptions are often free. Also, most will permit you to do free searches of their online archives, even if the full text of articles is not free. Typically, a "hit" includes the full citation to the article and the first sentence of the article.

With that information, you should be able to locate articles of interest in the full-text microfilmed edition of the same newspaper. That will be available in Hamilton Library or through Inter Library Loan.

Limitations of online newspapers. Most online editions of most newspapers do not include every article published in the print editions. Nor do they reproduce every edition printed in a 24-hour period. Also, a few days after publication, most wire service articles will not usually be available in the archives of newspapers listed above, although you may find the same articles archived elsewhere on the Web. In most cases, you must pay to read articles published more than a few days, weeks or months ago ago.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

Major U.S. newspapers & news services. Below, names and links to fifteen of these online newspapers and news services are listed. These citations give the following information: 1) names of their parent companies; 2) inclusive dates indicating the extent of their respective online archives; and 3) whether accessing archives is fee-based or not.

Whether or not a fee is charged, many of these search engines require that you register with your e-mail address.

United Press International
News World Communications
online archives, 90 days or more.

The Christian Science Monitor
The First Church of Christ, Scientist
online archives, 1980 - present.

The Associated Press
"Owned by its 1,500 U.S. daily newspaper members"
online archives;
fee-based if older than 7 days.

The Boston Globe
The New York Times Company
online archives, 1872 - present;
searches free, full-texts free for articles from 2003 to present;
fee-based full-texts of earlier articles for non-subscribers.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

The New York Times
The New York Times Company
online archives, 1851 - present.

The Wall Street Journal
Dow Jones & Company
online archives;
fee-based.

The Washington Post
The Washington Post Company
online archives, 1877 - present;
fee-based if older than 60 days.

The Washington Times
News World Communications, Inc.
online archives, 1990 - present;
free searches, fee-based full-texts.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

U.S.A. Today
Gannett Co. Inc.
online archives, 1987 - present;
free abstracts, fee-based full-texts.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cox Newspapers, Inc.
online archives, 1985 - present;
"documents do not include photos or graphics."

Chicago Sun-Times
Hollinger International Inc.
online archives, 1986 - present;
fee-based if older than 30 days.

Chicago Tribune
Tribune Company
online archives, 1852 - present;
free searches, fee-based full-texts.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Lee Enterprises, Incorporated
online archives, 1988 - present;
free headlines, first paragraphs; fee-based full-texts.

The San Francisco Chronicle
Hearst Communications, Inc.
online archives, 1995 - present.

Los Angeles Times
Tribune Company
online archives, 1985 - present.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• Articles from many of the above newspapers are accessible through the proprietary Lexis-Nexis database if you are a registered student of the University of Hawai‘i or of another college or university subscribing to this service.

• If you do not immediately find what you are seeking, consult the print-edition indexes for these newspapers. You will find these indexes in Hamilton Library's reference section. In most cases, their coverage extends further back than the corresponding online archives. And their coverage is probably more thorough for having included all articles for each date of publication. Use the print indexes to find the articles on microfilm in Hamilton Library.

• These valuable newspapers do not deserve prestige for being "objective" as if they were "neutral." Most of them uncritically aid and abet the extension of U.S. military power abroad. For alternative news sources, return to the Directory, and click on links found on other pages of Pollard's website.

• Also, try NewsLibrary.

• Updated weekly, archives of the University of Wisconsin's Internet Scout Project provide annotated links to quality websites on a broad variety of social and political issues in the news.

• No newspaper's editors or reporters are neutral in the sense of having no values or on the sense of not actively caring about the topic of their articles. The most influential newspapers in the United States are relatively self-disciplined. In other words, while claiming to be "independent" and "objective," they generally publish articles within an identifably narrow frame of values acceptable to U.S. Government policymakers.

• To consider competing perspectives, visit websites of Internet newspapers linked to the Emerging civil society and Asia, comparatively pages and other resources on Pollard's website.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• "Online news, breaking news, feature stories and more" are offered by ABC News.

• The parent company of CNN (Cable News Network) is Time Warner Inc.

• Access "breaking news headlines and video from CBS News." Its parent company is the CBS Corporation.

• "A long-term trend toward consolidation has prevailed throughout the history of the broadcasting industry, beginning with group ownership of the earliest radio stations of 1920-1921." In recent years, this trend apparently has accelerated.¹

¹ Herbert H. Howard, "Television Station Ownership in the United States: A Comprehensive Study (1940-2005)," Journalism Communication Monographs, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 2006), p. 72.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

• Search the IPD Group's InBox Robot news archive.

• Enter Portals to the World, and select a country of interest.

• The French newspaper Le Monde links to news sources across the world.

• For "news and views from around the world," visit WorldPress.

• Yahoo! News, provides world news and international headlines from and about the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, Asia, Canada, Australia and Antarctica.

TOP OF THIS PAGE.

Last modified, 14 November 2007.

© 1999-2007, Vincent K. Pollard.
Contribute to high-quality, accessible Internet research by reporting dead links.

It is prohibited to include this website's content in passworded or fee-for-service electronic databases. If your website uses "no-frames" html web pages, linking is allowed.