Archive Folder: Newspapers

Spenser Andrade

Posted: 4/24/2020

Newspapers are normally printed daily or weekly. Usually, a newspaper will offer information and opinions about local, regional, and national events, supplying a valuable primary source to researchers. The Hilton-Green Research Room houses a collection of select Northwest Florida newspapers. Two valuable newspapers currently in the collection, although incomplete, include the Colored Citizen and the Gulf Coast Voice. These two newspapers served a target audience: Pensacola’s African American community. The Colored Citizen, a weekly, was printed from 1914 to 1965. With over forty issues, the Hilton-Green Research Room houses the largest known collection of this newspaper. The Gulf Coast Voice, founded as the Pensacola Voice, another weekly newspaper, was printed from 1964 to 2018. 

A portion of the Hilton-Green Research Room’s newspaper

collection. Notice the amount of space the boxes occupy.

However, collecting new newspapers is very problematic. Aging newspapers become extremely fragile, forming tears along creases from old folds and the edges of the papers begin to fray. The paper’s material stability degrades and discolors from acidic degradation caused by chemicals found in the wood pulp and ink, increasing the newspaper's fragility. Newspapers will also deteriorate in humid environments and are susceptible to photolytic degradation (i.e, damage from light). Another problem collecting and housing newspapers is a matter of space. Ideally, newspapers are stored flat inside acid-free containers, taking up a lot of real estate on the storage area’s shelves.

A fantastic way of mitigating a newspaper’s size while enabling preservation is by microfilm. Microfilm is basically an image of a newspaper captured and stored on a reel of film. A viewing machine, aptly called a microfilm reader, is used to project and enlarge the images onto a screen into a readable size. Possibly the only downside to microfilm is navigating the long reels to find a specific issue or article. The Hilton-Green Research Room has a small collection of microfilmed newspapers and a microfilm reader. One notable newspaper in our microfilm collection is the Pensacola Gazette. Printed from the 1820s to the 1860s, the Gazette offers a glimpse into territorial and pre-Civil War Pensacola. We also have a few issues of the Floridian on microfilm, the first newspaper printed in Pensacola after Florida became a U.S. territory in 1821. 

A box of microfilmed Pensacola newspapers. Shown is a reel of Pensacola Gazette

issues from March 1851 to March 1854.

One of the more convenient newspaper resources today is Newspapers.com, a website owned and operated by Ancestry. Newspapers.com contains a vast archive of digitized and searchable newspapers from around the United States. Their archive includes a large collection of the Pensacola News Journal. Founded as two competing papers, the Pensacola Daily News in 1889 and Pensacola Journal in 1897, the newspapers consolidated under Perry Publications in the early 1920s. They continued as separate morning and evening editions, combining into the News-Journal on Sundays. Gannett, the publishers of USA Today, bought the papers in 1969 and changed the papers into today’s familiar singular format in 1985. The Hilton-Green Research Room subscribes to Newspapers.com, which is available on the research computers in the archives.

A screenshot from Newspapers.com showing the Pensacola

Journal’s April 1985 issue announcing the consolidation of the

two papers into its present-day format.