Ancestry.com set up a Newspapers.com as a separate newspaper website in 2012. You can pay different subscriptions for both sites, or shell out for one big package with access to all content.
It’s not hard to find complaints on genealogy forums that the access levels are confusing. I’ll break it all down clearly in this article.
I have a separate review of Newspapers.com that’s full of tips on making the most of the archive. This article focuses on your subscription options.
Is Newspapers.Com Free With Ancestry?
I see a common question pop up on genealogy forums. As Newspapers.com is owned by Ancestry, do Ancestry members get free access to the Newspapers.com archive?
Free access to Newspapers.com is not included with the lower levels of Ancestry membership. The All-Access level includes free but limited access to Newspapers.com.
But keep an eye out for special offers, particularly around national holidays. Ancestry has given free weekend access to Newspapers.com in the past.
They may also bump up All-Access members, by giving a temporary upgrade to the highest level of access to Newspapers.com. A recent example was President’s Day in February 2020.
How Much Does Newspapers.Com Cost?
At the time of writing, the Newspaper.Com Basic access is about $8 per month or $45 for a six-month package. The Publisher Extra level is about $20 per month, with a very decent six-month discount at $75.
You can purchase an independent subscription to Newspapers.com, and never use the Ancestry website.
If you intend to use both websites for your family research, it may be more cost-effective to purchase an Ancestry membership that comes with access to Newspapers.com. But then again, it may not. The dual entry paths can be confusing, so I’ll try to break it down in this article.
Newspaper.Com has two levels of access: Basic and Publishers Extra. I’ll get into those levels in a later section. Both levels are available monthly or for a discounted six month period.
You can see what they have to offer with a 7-day free trial (sponsored link). Remember to cancel your order if you’ve got everything you wanted.
Newspaper.Com Standalone Subscriptions
The Newspaper.com subscriptions tend to be lower in cost than Ancestry membership.
Personally, I’ve paid for a month here and there when I know I’ll have a few weeks with spare time. I’m usually looking for obituaries, which means I need the Publisher Extra level (more on that anon).
I prep in advance with a lot of “free” searching to prepare a hit-list of pages behind the Extra firewall. Then I shell out the 20 bucks and “go mad” for a month of searching, clipping, and saving.
The only reason I’ve never taken a longer package is that Newspapers.com does not have some of the Irish regional newspapers that are of most value to my own family research.
Your purchasing decision comes down to the volume of content on Newspapers.com that you expect to be relevant to your family research.
If I was American and starting out my genealogy journey, I’d probably plump for the six-month option. Having done a little bit of digging to make sure that my region of interest is well-presented in the collections. And also checked the free sites I discuss in this section.
Ancestry Subscriptions with a Newspaper Addon
Ancestry subscriptions are more complicated as there are different offers for different regions. For example, American customers have three levels of membership while U.K. and Irish customers have two.
We have a detailed breakdown in our review of all the Ancestry membership subscriptions (this includes tips on getting discounts). Stick with us here to focus on the newspaper angle!
The question of which level includes access to Newspapers.com is easy to answer. Only the highest level of “All Access” membership includes the basic Newspaper.com package.
If you are an Ancestry “All Access” member and want to upgrade to the Publisher Plus package with Newspapers.com – you basically have to pay the difference between Basic and Plus. But keep an eye out for emails offering a discounted price on a six-month upgrade. I’ve seen mention of occasional half-price offers, which could be sweet.
For every other Ancestry member? Remember that Ancestry has its own newspaper collection. And there are free alternatives which we list in a later section of this article.
But it’s usually not difficult to recognize when you need access to Newspapers.com. The Ancestry record search that is giving you a “blocked” snippet of an obituary that could blow open that brick wall? You need access!
So now the question is figuring out the more cost-effective route to the articles you need.
Should Ancestry Members Upgrade to “All-Access” to get Newspapers.com?
Let’s say your Ancestry membership is currently below “All-Access”, and therefore does not include Newspapers.com. If you desperately want access to Newspapers.com, should you upgrade your Ancestry membership to “All-Access”? And then pay extra for Publisher Extra?
Bear in mind that the six-month independent subscription to Publisher Extra may be lower than upgrading your Ancestry membership.
So then, you need to consider if all the other extras bundled with Ancestry’s All-Access membership can justify the not insignificant outlay. Well, if you’re big into American military documents – maybe it is! Because All-Access also gives you the Fold3 archives.
But if not – then skipping “All-Access” and taking out an independent Newspaper.com subscription may be perfectly adequate for your needs.n
But which level? Basic or Publishers Extra? Let’s look at what’s in each offering.
What Is Included In Newspapers.Com Basic?
The newspaper content available to Basic access tends to be out-of-copyright. For American newspapers, this usually means a cut-off point in the 1920s.
But the large range of newspapers goes back to the 1700s!
Basic membership gives you all the website features such as clipping content. There’s no reduction in features compared to Publishers Extra. The only difference (and it is pretty major) is in the content.
What Is Newspapers.Com Publishers Extra?
The Publisher Extra level gives you access to content where the publisher retains the rights to the newspaper contents.
Of course, Ancestry has to pay the copyright owner for your access. And is therefore passing on some or all of the cost to you. When I say it like that, doesn’t it seem perfectly reasonable? Unfortunately, Ancestry doesn’t really say it like that when we’re purchasing the Basic subscription. Which gets peoples’ backs up.
Broadly speaking, the Publisher Extra will have a full run of a newspaper up to recent years. There may be gaps for older periods. But crucially, you get access to articles and obituaries from the mid-1920s and forward. This can be a hugely valuable resource for researching your collateral lines.
By that, I mean the descendants and family of the siblings of your direct ancestral line. Your tree is going high, wide, and deep! I’ve got an article on building out your family tree to connect your DNA matches. Twentieth-century obituaries may play a big role in your research.
Newspapers.Com Publishers Extra – Continuing Controversy
When Ancestry launched Newspapers.com in 2012, there was only one level of access. Subscribers got whatever was available on the new website. This changed with the introduction of Publishers Extra in early 2016.
Teething Problems
Ancestry decided not to “grandfather in” the existing Newspapers.com subscribers with a free upgrade. This wouldn’t have been so noticeable if the Publishers Extra level only had new content that had never been seen before on the website. Which is kinda what their people said was the case.
I’ve pulled this staffer quote from the comment trail below the official announcement on the corproate blog.
The new Publishers Extra is actually content that was not on the site before. The content you had available before this new program launched is still in place and we will continue to add papers to that subscription level.
It’s clear from the comment trail that there were some serious glitches in the roll-out. Some newspapers got pushed entirely behind the Extra paywall, which meant that Basic subscribers lost access to articles they’d previously found on the site. This was a bug or miscategorization in many cases, and the Support Team rectified the access in due course.
I’m still not sure if it was a bug in all cases. Or if some existing content did actually move from Basic to Extra. Regardless, it led to a lot of annoyed reaction across genealogy forums.
It would be nice to be able to report that once the teething problems were over, all past and future Newspapers.com customers were happy evermore. Unfortunately, that is not what has happened.
Current Negative Perceptions
You can find gripes and complaints about Newspapers.com access levels on genealogy forums since it launched. And people are still getting confused by what is on offer.
Here’s some comments in 2020 underneath an article on the Family History Daily blog. The first is from someone who paid for the Basic stand-alone subscription to Newspapers.com:
A week ago, I signed up to newspapers.com on the one-month plan, $7.99 USD. Having taken my money, newspapers.com then locked all the search results that I had paid to see, and demanded an upgrade to “Publisher’s Extra” to see what I had already paid to see.
And what about upgrading your Ancestry subscription to get access to Newspapers.com? Here’s someone who did just that:
I upgraded to Ancestry All-Access because they were running a deal. At this point, Newspapers has been completely useless. Everything that looks like it might be interesting will pop up a window: “Give us more money and we will show you something useful. We really mean it this time….really”.
It’s fair to say that those are two very disgruntled customers.
The official Ancestry line will be that both customers were mistaken in what they thought they had paid to see. They both got the Basic level, and the content they wanted is at Extra level.
So is it the customers’ fault? I don’t think so. But I may be biased – I made the same mistake the first and only time I shelled out for a one-month Basic subscription, thinking I’d get some 20th-century obituaries.
The Newspapers.Com Marketing Should Be Much Much Clearer
Look at this package comparison on the Newspapers.com website, as of November 2020. This is the main sign-up page. The yellow highlighting is mine.
So, the page states clearly that Basic gets 186 million+ pages, while Extra gets 433 million+ pages.
But what’s not stated clearly is that individual newspapers are divided across the two categories. You may view an article in the Des Moines Chronicle from 1921 – but try to see a page from three years later? Up pops the “give us more money” window if you’re on the Basic level.
I don’t see why prospective Basic customers should be able to predict how this works before they pay their subscription. Not based on that marketing page, anyway.
Facebook, Reddit, genealogy blogs – disgruntled customers have been venting about this on family history forums since the inception of Publishers Extra.
It would be a pity if more prospective customers were put off by the thought that Newspapers.Com is not worth investigating as a resource. I wish Ancestry would improve the marketing pages to make it absolutely clear what customers should expect.
Other Subscription-Based Alternatives
The two main North American subscription-based alternatives are GenealogyBank and NewspaperArchive.com. Both have their own archive of newspapers and obituaries.
The rival companies have agreed exclusive contracts with different sets of newspapers. So, you’ll find titles on GenealogyBank that aren’t on Newspapers.com and vice versa.
I have a full review of GenealogyBank which also shows you how to use their trial period to evaluate if a subscription would be useful. I’ve also got some advice on how to get the best discounts for the service!
I also have an in-depth review of NewspaperArchive.com with plenty of tips on how to maximize their trial period.
If you have ancestors from the United Kingdom and Ireland, then my review of the BritishNewspaperArchive website should help you figure out if it will be useful to you.
Are There Free Alternatives to Newspapers.Com?
There are free newspaper archives that may give you what you need for your family research.
If you’re looking for American newspapers, you should check out the Chronicling America project. This is a digital archive of American newspapers that are in the public domain. If you’re looking for 19th-century content, it may have exactly what you need.
The Ancestry Hunt blog maintains a list of links for free newspaper archives around the world.
World-wide, you may also find libraries and other places of learning where you get free access to paid archives. In Ireland, I can use terminals in several large public libraries to access commercial newspaper archives.
Is Newspapers.Com Worth The Money?
You can check out our full Newspapers.com review. It has a step-by-step guide on evaluating how useful the archive will be for your family tree research.
Taking a free trial of Newspapers.Com will help you decide if it’s value for money for you. You may find that one month is enough to find what you need for your research.
You can access a free trial to Newspapers.com here (sponsored link).
You can also watch out for free weekend access at various times. These tend to be around major public holidays or anniversaries of historical events. Usually American, but my memory tells me that St Patrick’s Day also features.
How Does Ancestry Own Newspapers.Com?
Ancestry launched the Newspapers.com website in November 2012. The Newspapers.com brand is fully owned and operated by Ancestry.com.
Before Ancestry launched the separate website, it already had collections of newspaper archives on the main website. These were indexed and available as part of Ancestry’s record search. However, the newspaper search experience on Ancestry was not to the same quality as to the rest of its records. Basically, searches were not finding the relevant newspaper articles. This was due to issues with Ancestry’s implementation of OCR (optical character recognition) to scan and index their newspaper images.
Ancestry solved this problem in their usual way. They went out and bought another company.
Ancestry’s Purchase of iArchives
iArchives was a company specializing in digitizing American military records. They were based in Utah and had a subscription website called Footnote.com.
The company had developed its own proprietary digitization process for microfilm and paper collections. The Footnote website also had an excellent viewer for zooming in and out of images.
When Ancestry purchased iArchives in 2010, they didn’t just acquire a new military collection. They also got better OCR digitization and viewer technology than what they had in-house. And they got the benefit of software engineers with expertise in these areas.
Fold3 and Newspapers.Com
Are you wondering why you haven’t heard of an Ancestry website called Footnote.com? That’s because Ancestry rebranded Footnote as Fold3.
Why? That’s another story! Let’s focus on what else Ancestry did with the acquisition of iArchives.
The Newspaper.com website and features were built with the expertise of the iArchives developers who were now with Ancestry. When Newspapers.com launched, about half the newspaper collection was copied over from Ancestry’s database. The rest of Ancestry’s collection was transferred over a period of time.
I have an issue with image quality when saving newspaper.com clippings to a person in my Ancestry.com tree. The image is blurred (low resolution) when it lands at Ancestry. Why is this? I’ve called customer service at Ancestry, and they simply said this was something I should ask newspapers.com about. Are others having the same problem? Any solutions?
It’s not something I’ve seen reported. Newspapers.com is part of the Ancestry group, but they are run as a separate company. So it would be worth raising it with them separately to see what they say.
I have exactly the same problem Thomas. Am now thinking that I need to download from Newspapers.com in high res, then load it as a separate image to the gallery for any connected individuals in ancestry.com. Cumbersome and messy though.
Image quality when saving directly to Ancestry depends on the size of the clipping. If I’m saving a short article of, say, one or two paragraphs, I increase the size of the piece as much as the computer screen will allow before clipping it (full-screen view can give you a bit more magnification). I agree that larger articles are apt to be unreadable when saved directly. The solution is to save them to your computer in pdf format and then upload them to Ancestry. This procedure has the added benefit of always being accessible, in case you ever let your Ancestry membership lapse.
I tried saving as pdf and the quality wasn’t much better on large articles. Saving as jpg was the best, but then you don’t get the article info, i.e., Newspaper, Date, etc. After saving many articles over two subscription periods, I’m so disappointed. I put in a complaint today, keeping hope there is a solution.
I haven’t seen a resolution to the blurry articles, but I AM concerned that when I cancel my Ancestry subscription at some point in the future, I will lose all those newspaper.com items. I paid for the subscription, I should be able to keep them! Can someone confirm that they are lost? Or kept?
All digital documents you save in Ancestry are lost to you unless you have an active paid membership, or they happen to be part of the free access, such as the 1940 US census or the 1921 Canada census. Thus you need to download any document you find on Ancestry to your own computer if you don’t want to continually pay for a membership. If you click on the “Saved” button after you have saved it to a person in your tree, you will see the option to download it to your computer.
Clarification to my previous reply. If you let your Ancestry membership lapse, and then decide to pay again at a later date, then you get access to the digital documents back again. Thus you could choose to just pay for a month here and there. During those months of payment, you would have access to everything you paid for before. However, in my opinion, it is best to download everything to your computer, and save it in several places, so you always have access in case they actually decide to remove access later or you have a failure of your hard drive on your computer.
I had the same issue. The solution it so by-pass the clipping tool they provide on the website and make your own .jpg file as a clipping. I am using Firefox webbrowser because I find its screenshot easiest to use. The goal is to increase the lines of resolution that you have for the image you are interested in.
First zoom in as far as Newpapers.com will let you on the page you are interested in (zoom into the point where you can’t see it all because it zooms outside your screen).
Second change the zoom level of your browser down to where you can see the whole article on your screen again using the – + buttons on the web browser (on Firefox they are on the top right).
Third, take a screenshot using the web browser screenshot tool. On Firefox you right click and select screenshot. Firefox gives you 3 options to save full screen, visible or to use the mouse to select the area to screenshot. I use the mouse and then save the screenshot. The file format is initially a lossless .png but this can be changed using most free image/photo programs to save as a JPG or even a PDF. If saving as a JPG make sure to select options to keep resolution (and file size) as high as possible. Make sure you figure out where screenshots are saved on your harddrive and move them as necessary.
Once the image is saved you can add it to a person’s Ancestry profile as an image attachment (and of course you have a copy on your hard drive that you can access any time you want).
If you open the PNG you should see that it is much clearer and higher resolution than the clippings that are generated by the system. You won’t have the description of where the clipping came from that is generated when you use the clipping tool so you may want to give the file a long file name that includes the description.
Thank you for the detailed reply
would like to what information you on people with the of james amos drevesen arthur and annie drevesen and voccy
Hi, I don’t represent newspapers.com. But those surnames aren’t common so you may get good results from searching newspaper sites. I suggest you take a free trial and see what you can find.
How do I cancel my free newspaper trial period
Log into newspapers.com and go to the Accounts section (it’s in the drop-down menu at the top right of the screen).
Open the “Subscription & Payment” tab (left hand panel).
You should see the option to “Cancel and End Subscription”.
hope that helps!
been on ancestry for several yrs. Am trying to decide if newspaper/military etc would be of any benefit only wanting to have about 6 months thus cost not bad, however which is the best product for my money. I am more interested in birth, engagement, marriage and death information.
Would like a few pros and cons to this process as it seems a little confusing to me at this point.
I find that many times when I look for obituaries in particular I get advice to update my subscription to Publisher Extra which is a bit of a con since when I subscribed to newspaper.com no advice was given that it was incomplete; it is as the old saying goes a sprat to catch a mackerel.
you read above why that is right ..? it was clearly explained here… just not clearly explained by ancestry ..
Outstanding article – particularly the copyright explanation. Ancestry just says in a chat window (if you reach a person), “before 1922”. I get the copyright payment – it is reasonable. The Newspapers.com Access FAQ make no reference between the two tiers. The ambiguity creates unnecessary frustration (and I am much less likely to splurge on an add-on if they can’t tell me what I really get).
When you are able to save an article, it often is so small the text is unreadable. Unfortunately, you can’t tell until after. I resort to taking a screenshot such that all relevant source and page info is encompassed and attaching the record that way. It rather slows down your progress, negating some of the tools your subscription pays for. But what Ross says above. 🙂
When Ancestry took made integration of Newspapers.com, there were some newspapers that I access to (Herald-Palladium in MI) that suddenly went away. Considering the volume of connections in that area, it was major source of frustration and still is.
I use Family Tree Maker to sync trees (I work primarily online, then sync changes to my desktop). As far as I am aware, all the source documents are downloaded as media. I am not aware that if you pause or cease your Ancestry subscription, that Family Tree Maker is sophisticated enough to block access to “premium” content you originally had access to? Can someone confirm that?