CiteRight Get the Android app

Home · Newspaper article

How to cite a newspaper article

News sits between a journal article and a web page, and it takes one thing neither of them needs: the full date, down to the day.

DOI, ISBN and PubMed lookups go directly from your browser to Crossref, OpenLibrary or NCBI. We do not receive your identifier. Web links need details you enter yourself. How this works · Privacy

The same source in all seven styles

One report from The Guardian, in all seven styles. These are not typed out by hand: they come from the same formatter that writes your reference above, so what you read here is what you will get.

APA 7

Bowcott, O. (2019). Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation. The Guardian, 1. https://www.theguardian.com/

MLA 9

Bowcott, Owen. "Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation." The Guardian, 2019, p. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/.

Harvard

Bowcott, O. (2019) Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation. The Guardian, p. 1. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/

Chicago 18

Bowcott, Owen. "Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation." The Guardian (2019): 1. https://www.theguardian.com/.

IEEE

O. Bowcott, "Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation," The Guardian, p. 1, 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/

Vancouver

Bowcott O. Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation. The Guardian. 2019:1. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/

AMA 11

Bowcott O. Supreme court hears arguments on prorogation. The Guardian. 2019:1. https://www.theguardian.com/

Plain text cannot carry italics. Where a style italicises a title, apply it in your document after pasting.

What you need, and where to find it

Author

The byline. Agency copy often has none, and that is normal rather than something to work around.

Full date

Day, month and year. A journal is identified by its issue; a newspaper is identified by its day.

Headline

As printed. Online headlines are sometimes rewritten after publication, so use the one on the version you read.

Newspaper name

The masthead. The Guardian and The Times keep their The; most style guides keep it too.

Page or section

For a print copy. An online article has no page number, and inventing one is worse than leaving it out.

URL

For an online article, the permanent link rather than whatever your search left in the address bar.

Where people go wrong

A print paper has a page, an online one has a link

Do not give both unless you genuinely used both. A page number attached to a web address tells a marker you copied the shape of somebody else's reference.

Unsigned copy starts with the headline

Wire stories and editorials frequently carry no byline. The headline moves into the author's place, which is also what files the reference correctly in an alphabetical list. The generator does this when you leave the author empty.

Strip the tracking off the URL

Everything after a question mark in a shared news link is usually the paper working out who sent it to you. Cut it. The address should be the shortest one that still opens the article.

Questions

The headline changed after I read it. Which one?

The one you read and quoted, with the date you read it. If the article now says something different, that is exactly the case where an accessed date earns its place.

Is a news website a newspaper?

If it has a masthead and publishes dated reporting, cite it as news. A publisher's blog or press release is a web page, and its author is the organisation.

Do I cite the reporter or the agency?

The reporter when there is a byline. When the piece is credited only to an agency such as Reuters or the Press Association, treat the agency as the author.

Citing something else?

Or read the rules for one style

THE ANDROID APP

Keep them, export them, and check your draft

CiteRight for Android keeps references in projects, exports a bibliography in any of the six styles, and checks a draft sentence by sentence for text that overlaps a source.

Get it on Google Play