MLA Newspaper Citation Generator

How to cite a newspaper article in MLA 9

MLA 9's container model treats newspapers exactly like other periodicals: author, "article title," Newspaper Name, date, page or URL. The two things that trip people up are the full day-month-year date (newspapers always have one) and the section indicator for print editions (sec. A or page prefix like A12). Online articles are simpler — they just need the URL — but the basic structure is the same.

Example MLA 9 newspaper Works Cited entries

Hayes, Christina. "Why Local News Still Matters." The New York Times, 14 Apr. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/04/14/opinion/local-news-democracy.html.

Rosenfeld, Megan. "City Council Approves Transit Plan." The Washington Post, 22 Sept. 2023, p. A1.

The slots you fill in for a newspaper article

• Author — last name first: Hayes, Christina. Two authors: last-name-first for the first, first-name-first for the second. Three or more: first author + et al. If the byline is "By the editors," skip the author slot.
• Title of source — the headline in quotation marks, title case ("Why Local News Still Matters"). Period inside the closing quote.
• Title of container — the newspaper name, italicized, in title case. Keep The if it's part of the masthead: The New York Times, not New York Times.
• Publication date — day-month-year, abbreviated month: 14 Apr. 2024. Always include the full date — newspapers publish daily.
• Location — for online articles, the URL with https:// dropped. For print, the page number with section if the paper uses lettered sections: p. A1 or p. 12.

In-text citation for a newspaper

MLA's in-text format is author + page (or just author for unpaginated online articles): (Hayes) for the online opinion piece, (Rosenfeld A1) for the print story. No comma between author and page. If the headline is in your sentence, only the locator goes in parentheses: Hayes argues that local journalism is "the connective tissue of democratic life" (A14). For articles with no author byline, use a shortened title: ("City Council").

(Hayes)

Online vs. print — what changes?

Only the location slot. Online: URL with https:// stripped. Print: page number (with section letter if the paper uses one). Same publication name, same date format, same byline rules. If you accessed the online edition of a print paper, treat it as online — use the URL, not the print page number, because the page reference is meaningless to a reader who clicks through.

Newspaper section letters (A1, B4, C2)

Many large dailies (NYT, WaPo, WSJ) use lettered sections. MLA 9 incorporates the section letter into the page number: p. A1, pp. B4–6. If the paper uses named sections instead of letters (e.g., "Business," "Arts"), name the section before the page: Business sec., p. 2. For non-sectioned papers, just give the page: p. 5.

Articles with no byline

Lots of news pieces — wire copy, brief news items, editorials — have no byline. Skip the author slot and start with the headline in quotation marks. In-text, use a shortened title: ("City Council Approves" A1). Don't write "Anonymous" or "Staff" as the author unless the paper itself credits a "Staff Writer." Editorials that say "By the Editorial Board" can use that as the author.

Wire-service stories (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg)

If the paper credits a wire service (Associated Press, Reuters, AFP), MLA 9 lets you cite the paper that printed it. The wire service appears as "other contributors" if you want to be explicit, but it's usually fine to omit. The important thing is to cite the article as you read it — in The Boston Globe, not in "AP." Date is the date the article ran in that paper, not when AP filed it.

Newspaper archives and databases

Articles pulled from ProQuest Historical Newspapers, NewspaperArchive, or Times Machine get MLA 9's two-container treatment: the newspaper is container 1, the archive is container 2. Format: … The New York Times, 22 Sept. 1923, p. 14. ProQuest Historical Newspapers, URL. If the article has a stable URL within the archive (most do), include it.

Common MLA 9 newspaper mistakes

• Don't drop "The" from newspaper names that include it: The Guardian, not Guardian.
• Don't write the date in American month-first format. MLA 9 uses day-month-year: 14 Apr. 2024.
• Don't use https:// in the URL. MLA 9 wants the bare form: www.nytimes.com/…
• Don't add a page number to an online article in your in-text citation. Online news has no page numbers — just (Author).
• Don't cite the article via Google Scholar or social media. Use the publisher's own URL.

How the generator works

Paste a news URL and we read the page's metadata — author byline, headline, publication date, and publication name — from Open Graph tags and embedded JSON-LD. Major papers (NYT, WaPo, Reuters, BBC, Bloomberg, AP) expose all of this cleanly. The CSL engine renders MLA 9 formatting: quoted headline in title case, italic publication, day-month-year date, bare URL with protocol stripped. The matching in-text (Author) citation comes alongside.