Well, this sucks (SABR forced to discontinue ProQuest access)

www.paperofrecord.com.

Glad you brought this back up. (I was too lazy. )

The interface on PoR sucks, but digitized Sporting News archives since 1886 are plenty valuable, for research and otherwise. I've already registered and used it today. I'm thrilled that it's finally free.

But on a related note, not only does the search tool and interface suck -- but I can't e-mail the PDFs directly to my Hotmail account because Hotmail doesn't accept .asp files now. So I have to save them as PDFs to the hard drive, then send them to myself with the PDF attachments. THAT's a pain in the ass, too.

And again: newspaperarchive.com is another option for searching digital newspaper archives. I believe it's $9.95/month for that one.

 

Newspaperarchives.com, while real hit or miss, and a bit awkward, can be very, very valuable, particularly pre-1980. Although it does not include major papers, many of the smaller to mid-level dailies include local features or wire copy that did not appear in larger papers. When you search, however, you get the entire page as a pdf. I've found it most effective find, enlarge, select then copy the precise article I want into word, and then print from that.

Newslibrary.com has hundreds of papers from early '80s a/o '90s to the present, including many major and regional papers. There is a charge per article, but a targeted search can be useful.

NY Times Select gives you access to 100 stories per month from their archive at no additional cost, and there are still a few papers out there, like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, that make their entire electronic archive available for free.

 

Probasbeallarchive.com (which is part of newspaperarchive.com) is free.

Do you have a link to the Seattle P-I archive ... can't seem to find it on their site.