I'm from the UK, I don't live in London what makes it hard to get access to any large archival storage of news articles or pages on the subject I want to do. I want to look at foreign (UK and US) perception of Japan throughout history through how newspapers covered Japan.
I was wondering if anyone could recomend any good digital archives that hold a large amount of news articles (or just primary source material like this) thats easily accessible online which one can sift through and find primary sources such as news papers easily through filters or what not?
I'm most likely going to resort to subscribing to a few newspaper companies own digital archives that they maintain themselves to get a larger more fluent and chronological order of newspapers from a certain newspaper brand that can help my research.
However, again to avoid subscribing to multiple news paper own digital platform i am wondering if anyone has any public archives that beholds a large data base of news articles? I know pretty much any archive has this If you delve it deep enough but am curious to see if there's a public domain newspaper related archive or a large archive such as LOC (Library of Congress) that gives access to multiple different prestigious news firm archival history that you can look at in bulk and focus on a good chunk of its history (e.g 1870-80).
See if any of your local public libraries subscribe to the British Newspaper Archive. It's a huge searchable collection of UK newspapers. It was created by partnering with the British Library to make their huge collection of newspapers accessible to researchers. And unlike some other online newspaper archives, it isn't limited to university subscriptions. In fact, I believe it's more likely for public libraries than universities to offer access to this one. (My uni didn't even have it!)
It's been a huge help in my own research. You can do a preliminary search on your own just to see if they have the sort of thing you're looking for. You won't be able to view the actual newspapers though until you log in through an affiliated library. You can search by keyword and limit results by geographical and chronological range. So for example, here are the search results for "Japan" limited to 1870-1879. From there, you could further refine your search to look at specific newspapers or specific areas of the UK. Of course, to read most of the actual articles you will need to be logged in, but doing the search ahead of time can be really helpful when planning your trip to the library.
In my case, I wasn't able to download the articles while using the library computers. I knew this ahead of time by emailing the librarians and asking, so I was prepared for that. That meant that I was ready to type up relevant quotes with their full bibliographical references on my own laptop which I brought with me. Hope that helps!