How to Cite a Newspaper Article in MLA and APA (Online & Print)

By MLA Generator Editorial Team · Updated July 7, 2026

A newspaper article is one story that can reach you four different ways — on paper, on the paper’s own website, through a library database, or reprinted on some other site — and each route changes the citation. Then the styles pile on their own quirks: MLA 9 and APA 7 keep the The in The New York Times while Chicago drops it, print pages come in un-numberlike forms such as A1 and “Arts and Leisure sec.,” and APA insists that CNN is not a newspaper at all. None of this is guesswork, though: the MLA Handbook, the MLA Style Center, and APA Style all publish newspaper-specific rules, and this guide walks through them with one real article formatted in all seven styles.

The shortest answer: in MLA, cite Author Last Name, First Name. “Article Title.” The Newspaper Name, Day Month Year, p. X. For an article you read online, swap the page number for the URL without https://: Carey, Benedict. “Can We Get Better at Forgetting?” The New York Times, 22 Mar. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/health/memory-forgetting-psychology.html. In-text, cite the author, adding the page only when there is one: (Carey).

What counts as a newspaper article

For citation purposes, a newspaper article is any single piece a newspaper publishes under its own name — a news story, feature, review, opinion column, editorial, or obituary — whether you read it in print or on the paper’s website. The unit is one article with its own headline; the newspaper is the container it sits in.

Some things that look like newspaper articles are better cited as something else:

• A story on a news-only website — CNN, BBC News, HuffPost, Reuters — is still covered by this guide, but APA formats it differently because no daily or weekly newspaper stands behind it. The details are in the APA section below; structurally it follows the website format.
• A magazine or scholarly article follows the journal article format, which adds volume and issue numbers newspapers do not have.
• A video on a newspaper’s site is cited as a video, closer to a YouTube video than to an article.
• A quotation the article itself quotes raises the indirect-source problem covered in how to cite a quote.

If it has a headline, a dateline, and a newspaper’s name over it, this page applies.

Information to collect before you cite

Grab these while the article is open — the print-only fields are the easiest to lose:

• Byline — a person, several people, or a wire service such as the Associated Press. Some articles have none.
• Headline — exactly as published. MLA will convert it to title case; APA will convert it to sentence case.
• Newspaper name as the masthead shows it — including an initial The. MLA 9 and APA 7 both keep it.
• Full date — day, month, and year, not just the year.
• Page numbers and section (print) — A1, p. 5, Arts and Leisure. Note whether the article continues on a non-consecutive page.
• Edition (print) — only if the masthead names one, e.g. late edition.
• URL (online) — the article’s own address, not your search results page.
• Database name and permalink — if you found it in ProQuest, Newspapers.com, or another library database.

The generator at / extracts the byline, headline, paper name, and date from a pasted article URL; the print-only fields are yours to add.

One newspaper article in all seven styles

The article below is the one APA Style uses in its own official newspaper-reference examples, so the APA row is authoritative rather than constructed.

The source: Benedict Carey’s article “Can We Get Better at Forgetting?”, published by The New York Times on March 22, 2019, at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/health/memory-forgetting-psychology.html. Accessed July 4, 2026.

Two details in that table separate the styles more than anything else. The first is the headline’s casing: MLA and Chicago title-case it inside quotation marks; APA leaves it in plain sentence case with no quotation marks at all. You normalize the capitalization to the style — the paper’s own house style does not survive into the citation.

The second is what happens to “The.” MLA 9 and APA 7 treat an initial article as part of the periodical’s title: The New York Times, italicized, The and all. Chicago’s official examples drop it — New York Times — which is why that row is the odd one out. Vancouver sets the paper’s name in plain roman type, and Harvard, Vancouver, IEEE, and AMA add an access date; MLA and APA do not ask for one.

The in-text citation for the same article:

• MLA: (Carey) — the article is unpaginated online; a print article adds the page, e.g. (Soloski 5)
• APA: (Carey, 2019) or narrative Carey (2019); for a direct quotation from print, (Harlan, 2013, p. A1)
• Chicago author–date: (Carey 2019) — no comma between author and year
• Harvard: (Carey, 2019)
• Vancouver: (1) or superscript ¹, from the entry’s number in your list
• AMA: superscript ¹
• IEEE: [1]

How to cite a newspaper article in MLA

The MLA 9 works-cited template for print:

Author Last Name, First Name. “Title of Article.” Newspaper Name, Day Month Year, p. X.

For an article read on the paper’s website, replace the page with the URL, minus https://. The MLA Style Center’s own example, from its post on newspaper sections, shows the full print form:

Soloski, Alexis. “The Time Has Come to Play Othello.” The New York Times, 20 Nov. 2016, Arts and Leisure sec., p. 5.

Four details in that example do real work. The section name sits in the location element — after the date, before the page — as “Arts and Leisure sec.” The The stays: MLA 9 treats an initial article as part of a periodical’s title, a 2021 change many older guides still miss. The headline is converted to title case inside quotation marks. And Othello, a play title embedded in the headline, keeps its italics inside the quoted title.

Three more location rules cover most print articles. If the masthead names an edition, the Style Center’s answer is “Yes. If an edition is named on the newspaper’s masthead, include it as the version in your entry” — it goes right after the paper’s name: The New York Times, late ed., 20 Nov. 2016. If the paper is local and its name does not identify the city, add it in square brackets: Post and Courier [Charleston, SC]. And an article that jumps to a non-consecutive page is cited by its first page plus a plus sign: pp. A1+.

The in-text citation is the author and page for print — (Soloski 5) — and the author alone for an unpaginated online article: (Carey).

The variants you are most likely to need:

No author. Begin with the article title and carry on; the in-text citation becomes a shortened title in quotation marks: (“Aiding Defectives”).

From a library database. Give the full entry, then add the database as a second container — its name in italics, followed by the permalink the database supplies:

Author Last Name, First Name. “Title of Article.” Newspaper Name, Day Month Year, p. X. ProQuest, permalink.

Reprinted on another website. MLA’s rule is that “the website itself should be considered the container no matter the original form of publication,” with the original paper credited afterward. The Style Center’s example is also an official no-author entry:

“Aiding Defectives.” Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History, www.uvm.edu/~eugenics/primarydocs/onbfpst032031.xml. Originally published in The Burlington Free Press, 20 Mar. 1931.

How to cite a newspaper article in APA

The APA 7 reference template, from APA Style’s “Newspaper article references” page (Publication Manual, 7th ed., Section 10.1):

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of article in sentence case. Newspaper Name. URL

APA’s three official examples cover the three ways you meet a newspaper article. Online, on the paper’s own site:

Carey, B. (2019, March 22). Can we get better at forgetting? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/health/memory-forgetting-psychology.html

In print, with pages listed after the paper’s name — every page the article touches, no “p.” or “pp.”:

Harlan, C. (2013, April 2). North Korea vows to restart shuttered nuclear reactor that can make bomb-grade plutonium. The Washington Post, A1, A4.

And from a library database, where you give the newspaper title plus any page numbers the database shows and otherwise end the reference there, because APA says to “not include database information in the reference”:

Stobbe, M. (2020, January 8). Cancer death rate in U.S. sees largest one-year drop ever. Chicago Tribune.

The mechanics behind them: the article title is plain — sentence case, no quotation marks, no italics; the newspaper title is italicized in title case with its initial The kept; and a URL, when present, takes no period after it. APA 7 dropped the “Retrieved from” that used to precede URLs, so if a guide shows it, the guide is out of date.

One official carve-out matters more than everything else on competitor pages: “If the article is from a news website (e.g., CNN, HuffPost) — one that does not have an associated daily or weekly newspaper — use the format for a webpage on a news website instead.” That format flips the typography: the article title is italicized and the site name sits in plain roman type:

Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of story. Site Name. URL

So a Washington Post story italicizes The Washington Post, while a CNN story italicizes the headline and leaves CNN plain. The test is whether a daily or weekly newspaper stands behind the site, not how newsy the site looks.

In-text, cite author and year: parenthetical (Carey, 2019) or narrative Carey (2019). Quoting directly from a print article, add the page with “p.” even though the reference list omits it: (Harlan, 2013, p. A1). Quoting from an unpaginated online article, point with a paragraph number or section heading instead: (Carey, 2019, para. 4).

Edge cases

No author at all. Both styles start the entry with the article title, and the in-text citation becomes a short title. In APA the title moves in front of the date. Reserve “Anonymous” for an article literally bylined that way — an unsigned article is not anonymous, just unsigned.

A wire-service story. When the byline is an agency rather than a person — Associated Press, Reuters — the styles disagree about whether that byline is an author. APA says yes and treats it as a group author: Associated Press. (2020, January 8). … MLA takes the opposite line: the MLA Style Center says an agency’s name “is not a meaningful indicator of authorship,” so treat the article as anonymous and begin the entry with its title — and cite the publication facts of the version you consulted without detailing the story’s publication history.

It came from ProQuest or Newspapers.com. The styles split cleanly. APA cites it as the print article and stops after the newspaper title — no database name, no URL. MLA does the opposite and records the trail: full print details, then the database as a second container in italics with the permalink. Neither style wants your library’s messy session URL; use the stable permalink the database offers.

Pages that are not numbers. Print page “numbers” like A1 are fine as they are: MLA writes p. A1, or pp. A1+ when the story jumps to a non-consecutive page; APA lists every page after the paper’s name with no p. at all: The Washington Post, A1, A4.

An editorial or letter to the editor. APA has a dedicated format: add the label in square brackets after the title — [Editorial] or [Letter to the editor] — and, for an unsigned masthead editorial, start with the title. MLA covers these in a Style Center post; an unsigned editorial begins with its title, and you may add a plain description such as Editorial at the end of the entry when the genre matters to your argument.

The article is paywalled. A paywall changes nothing: cite the article normally with its URL — you are documenting where the article lives, not promising free access. Neither MLA nor APA has a special format for paywalled articles; the MLA Style Center’s post on subscription sources only covers how to get access (start with your library).

Your guide might be out of date. Newspaper citation is where stale advice concentrates. MLA 9 (2021) keeps the initial The in periodical titles, so The New York Times is correct and the “New York Times” still shown on many library pages is the pre-2021 rule. APA 7 (2020) dropped “Retrieved from” before URLs. And Chicago’s 18th edition (2024) drops the The and treats news-only sites and newspaper websites alike — the CMOS Q&A notes that the distinction between a news organization’s website like BBC News and a traditional newspaper’s website “has all but disappeared” — and typically cites news articles in notes only. If a page’s examples contradict these, check its edition before trusting anything else on it.

A final principle: cite the version you actually read — the print page, the paper’s website, the database record — and record the name the masthead uses, the fullest date shown, and where a reader can find the article again. Every style’s newspaper machinery is just an implementation of that.

Editorial methodology and sources