News and news archives

Overview | Today's news | Researching old news | Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre | Practical examples

Overview

People looking for news generally fall into two categories.

Today's news

If you want to know what is happening now then breaking news or headline aggregators will be their best starting point.

Researching old news

If you want to search for what happened a while ago, then there are databases we subscribe to that can allow you search over a range of years.

What you can get where will differ depending on whether you want new news or old news.

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Today's news

Australian news

New news is available everywhere. Australian newspapers, radio and television all have websites that deliver news. If you are looking for your usual news fix online, then you can easily find it. It is good to be able to get the latest headlines online without having to wait for a broadcast bulletin.

The Charles Darwin University library provides a link to the major newspaper sources on its newspaper page.

Finding online newspapers is easy. The National Library provides a gateway to all Australian Newspapers Online, including regional newspapers and weekly newspapers.

Most online news sites, such as the ABC, update their headlines frequently throughout the day. Use the 'Refresh' or 'Reload' button of your browser to ensure you are seeing the very latest news.

If you know the web address of the paper you want, you might find it easier to go directly there, for example, to Northern Territory News, Australian, or Australian Financial Review.

Some of the sites allow you to sign up to get the news headlines delivered daily to your email inbox.

News from other countries

For papers in other countries, try OnlineNewspapers.com, which links to a vast range of web-based newspapers. Select the country you want and follow the links from there.

Headline aggregators are also a good source of breaking news. These are sites which provide a list of headlines from which you can click to get the full news story. The sources for such news consist of newspapers and broadcast media worldwide. The main sites for this kind of material are Google News and Yahoo! News.

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Researching old news

In the public domain, the two major in-house databases for Australian news are News Limited's NewsText and the Fairfax News Store. These contain the full text of News Limited and Fairfax newspapers respectively and both are chargeable services. ABC Radio National is another archival source worth investigating. Most programs are archived and playable for a month after broadcast, while many programs, such as the Law Report, provide full program transcripts, some dating back several years. There are a couple of others and they can be found on the CDU Databases Newspaper page.

At CDU we subscribe to a major news service Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre. Also in our special collections we hold microfilm of the Australian national newspapers including the Northern Territory News. This is particularly relevant if you need to look at advertisements or notices as databases only index news articles.

Australia/New Zealand Reference Centre is an EBSCOHost Database that combines Australia and New Zealand specific magazines, newspapers and newswires, reference books, and company information to create a collection of regional full text content. Of direct relevance to us is that it provides access to Northern Territory News (including Sunday Territorian) and NT Business Review. It also covers many other papers from around Australia and New Zealand including the New Internationalist.

Searching can either be done via the main search screen or by using the title list to search within that title.

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Practical examples

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