Newspapers.com publisher extra free trial

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 20^th-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 19^th-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.

Interested In More Articles and Tutorials on Family Research?

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The number of options you have for genealogy resources sites is growing every year, and unless you’re a millionaire, you have to pick and choose where to spend your subscription money.

When newspaper research is what you’re after, most people turn to Newspapers.com and  GenealogyBank.com.

Side by Side

Take a quick look at how the two websites stack up side by side, and then we’ll get into more specifics.

Newspapers

The main attraction for both Newspapers.com and GenalogyBank.com is newspapers. Both sites house amazing collections that can help anyone with their family history research.

But each site has its own core collection that is distinctly different from the other. Knowing the differences is important in picking the right site for you.

Why Newspapers?

So why is having access to newspapers so important in the first place?

Newspapers are an incredible source of information when it comes to genealogy and family history. They are first-hand accounts written at the time, not legends passed down through the generations. And they go beyond the mere places and dates of many other records to bring your ancestors’ lives into focus.

Just some of the kinds of articles you’ll find in newspapers include:

• Obituaries and in memoriams
• Birth and Christening notices
• School enrollment, honor rolls, graduation lists, and other news
• Engagements, bridal showers, weddings, and even honeymoon arrangements
• Travel plans or reviews of returning from travel
• Legal notices, court appearances, and property sales
• Membership in and news from social clubs and fraternal organizations
• Enlistments into or mustering out of the Armed Forces
• Anything and everything else that people do in their lives

In some cases, you might even dig up a photo or illustration of your ancestor that you never imagined existed.

Read our full guide to newspapers for genealogy.

Newspapers at Newspapers.com

As you might guess just from the name, Newspapers.com is all about newspapers. Their collection includes digital scans of more than 400 million pages of newsprint from more than 8,700 different newspapers, and it is growing daily. They add millions more pages every month.

There are two collections at Newspapers.com. Their Basic package includes more than 100 million pages of historical newsprint. It covers primarily from 1700 to about the 1960s. It includes some more recent newspapers, but overall offers limited options when it comes to recent publications.

The Publisher Extra package provides access to all 400 million pages, including a vast treasure trove of more recent newspapers. Very often, you can find complete print runs of many major (and minor) newspapers extending from the 1960s all the way up into 2018. This is perfect for research on your more recently ancestors.

In every case, Newspapers.com includes complete digital images of the newspaper page, not single articles.

Newspapers at GenealogyBank.com

The primary focus of GenealogyBank is obituaries, and this is reflected in their collection. In general, their scans of full newspaper pages are from older newspapers, while their more recent collection focuses on just obituaries and other selected articles.

GenealogyBank’s collection covers more than 9,600 newspapers, with an incredible 95 percent of them not available anywhere else online.

While GenealogyBank has scanned pages from more newspapers than Newspapers.com, they have fewer articles overall. Why? Many of the newspapers in GenealogyBank.com’s collection are older papers from the 18^th and 19^th centuries. That means two things.

First, many older newspaper pages have been lost forever, destroyed either right away or at some point over the last couple hundred years.

Second, many newspapers did not last very long. During the 1800s especially, new newspapers were popping up all over the place. For example, in the year 1887, Kansas alone had about 700 different newspapers in print. Most of these papers did not last long, many of them less than a year. GenealogyBank includes a number of these very short run newspapers, which means lots of newspapers covered, but not as many total pages.

Because of their focus on obituaries, many modern newspapers are not complete runs, either. Only obituaries are available through GenealogyBank.com for these newspapers, not the rest of the articles.

Other Collections

Newspapers.com has one focus, newspapers, which they do amazingly well. But that is their only collection.

GenealogyBank.com has a massive newspaper collection as well, but that is not your only option when using them. They also provide access to government publications, historical books, and the Social Security Death Index.

Government Publications

This is a general term for anything produced by the government, so it includes a range of different types of information.

Among other things, you can find:

• Military records, including casualty lists
• Pension requests from Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers or their widows
• Adoption and other orphan petitions
• Grants of land or other property

Each record is different when it comes to the kinds of genealogical information they contain, but every one of them has something useful to offer.

Historical Books

People and communities are proud of their history, proud enough to want that history never to be forgotten. How do they do that? They write books.

There are thousands of genealogies and family histories already written, just waiting for you to discover how you are connected to them. While you can’t take everything in them at face value, they provide a framework that can save you countless hours on your research.

Many towns, cities, and counties have produced books about themselves, too. This was an especially popular thing to do in the late 1800s and early 1900s. These books not only talk about the area and how it came to be, but provide lists of names and even whole sections of biographies of prominent citizens.

You can also find historic maps, biographies, city directories, and even sermons and eulogies in the GenealogyBank collection.

Social Security Death Index (SSDI)

If you live in the United States, chances are you have a Social Security Number, and will apply for benefits someday (maybe you already have). This has been the case since the system was enacted in the 1930s.

While earlier decades are spotty, most people who have died since about 1971 can be found in the SSDI, especially if they were over 65 at the time of death.

While the SSDI is more impersonal than the other resources available at GenealogyBank, it can still be a great resource for finding out important facts about your ancestors.

Searching

Both websites provide easy to use basic searches, with enough powerful advanced search options to help you track down the information you need.

GenealogyBank lets you search each of their collections separately, or you can search on all of them at once. Because their obituaries are separated out from the rest of their newspaper archive, that means you have the power to find just obituaries on the names you search, rather than having to dig through a lot of other articles.

Advanced search options at GenealogyBank include limiting your search by a specific date or range of dates, and by adding keywords to your search.

Like most websites, you can also search a single location or a single newspaper, but GenealogyBank goes one better. The site makes it easy to search two or more states at once, two or more cities within a single state, or two or more specific newspapers. That extra power can save you a lot of duplicated effort.

Another great feature is the option to remove keywords from your search. In other words, you can search for articles that don’t contain a specific word. This is very helpful when you keep finding articles or obituaries from Philadelphia when you know your ancestors lived somewhere in western Pennsylvania.

Newspapers.com offers a variety of different search options as well. In addition to searching by name, location, dates, and keywords, you can also browse newspapers by paper and date, or find specific newspapers based on location and date.

While both sites have good search features, GenealogyBank has a cleaner, more intuitive advanced search page that makes it a little easier to use.

Places and Dates Covered

Every newspaper in the GenealogyBank collection was published in the United States, and their obituaries and other resources are collected from the U.S. as well. They provide excellent coverage within the U.S., but nothing from anywhere else.

Newspapers.com not only includes the entire United States (including the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico), but it also provides access to other English-language newspapers as well. Their collection includes newspapers from Canada, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Panama.

Both sites provide extensive coverage from about 1800 to about the 1960s. They have more limited options from the 1700s, with the oldest paper in either collection dating from 1690.

While some of GenealogyBank’s titles provide full page scans from more recent years, in many cases only obituaries and selected articles are available from the 1960s up to the present.

Newspapers.com does have full article coverage all the way up to 2018 for a wide range of newspapers. However, you need to subscribe to their more expensive Publishers Extra package to have access to most of these modern newspapers.

Subscriptions

GenealogyBank only has one real option when it comes to subscribing, by the month or by the year. Their monthly subscription is pretty pricey, but you get a huge discount (about 70% off) when you opt for the annual subscription.

GenealogyBank, unfortunately, does not offer any sort of free trial period, but you can get a 30-day trial subscription for half off of their regular monthly rate so you can check out what they have to offer without spending too much.

Newspapers.com offers both monthly and six-month subscriptions. In addition, they have two different subscription levels.

Their Basic package includes more than 100 million digitized pages from thousands of newspapers. While some modern issues are included, in general, the Basic package is better for historic newspapers prior to the 1960s.

Their Publishers Extra package gives you access to all 400 million pages from 8,700 newspapers all the way up to today.

Newspapers.com does offer a free 7-day trial to their Basic package so you can take a look for free.

Ancestry.com users: if you currently subscribe to Ancestry.com’s All Access subscription package, that package includes full access to Newspapers.com’s Basic package already built in. But if you want the Publishers Extra package, you’ll still have to pay full price for it.

And the Winner Is

In a perfect world, you should subscribe to both websites. While there is some overlap between them, they both host enormous unique collections as well.

Whether you should choose GenealogyBank.com or Newspapers.com really depends on what you consider most important.

If you want full access to modern newspapers, Newspapers.com is the clear winner, though you’ll have to buy their more expensive Publishers Extra package.

For newspapers from the United Kingdom and Canada, you also have to go with Newspapers.com.

For rare older newspapers that you won’t find anywhere else, GenealogyBank.com has an impressive collection. They’re also your better choice if you want access to their other resource collections, including the Social Security Death Index, historical books, and government publications.

While both sites provide access to obituaries through newspapers searches, GenealogyBank.com is your better choice if obituaries are your main focus. The site lets you search for obituaries faster and more accurately, and has an ongoing feed to make sure you are always up to date.

So which site you pick is up to you, but you won’t go wrong with either. Give them a try today.

For more information on both these sites, read our complete Newspapers.com review, and GenealogyBank review.