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Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology Research Guide

Newspapers and News Broadcasts

Newspapers and news broadcasts (both current and historical) are a primary source. Primary sources provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence about a subject. Primary sources are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented. Often these sources (e.g. newspapers and news broadcasts) are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later. Primary sources are characterized by their content, not their format (microfilm, digital, published, or original).

For more news sources, see the News guide.

Online News Collections

See also Historical Newspapers tab for more online news archives. 

Historical Online News Archives

Historical newspapers are a great primary resource. Many have been digitized and the full-text is searchable. Once you get to a website with the links below, you may need to read the help screen to learn how to search that particular website. If a newspaper has not been digitized, you may still find it on microfilm and will have to search it manually. 

Local News—Southern California

The UCLA Library has many newspapers in its collections that have not been digitized. They are not easily searchable in the UCLA Library Catalog if you do not know the title of the newspaper. If you are looking for newspapers from a specific city, you can search WorldCat via Firstsearch (requires the UCLA VPN from off-campus to access) and limit to newspapers in the UCLA Library. The search strategy to use is:

  1. Enter the city (e.g., los angeles) in the search box and select Publisher location from the drop-down menu.
  2. Limit the search to  Serial Publications
  3. Limit availability to
  4. Do the search, then select the Subtype Newspapers.

The results will be a list of newspapers from the publisher location searched.

Patrons can also use the freely available web version of WorldCat to search for newspapers and periodicals in library collections.

Selected Southern California newspapers are listed below:

Broadcast News Transcripts

News Broadcasts

Videos