APA 7th edition
How to cite a newspaper article in APA 7th edition
News sources need a full date rather than just a year, and the online version of an article rarely carries the page numbers the print version had.
THE FORMAT
A newspaper article in APA, at a glance
Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the article in sentence case. Newspaper Name. https://example.com/article
Whitcombe, D. (2024, March 3). Universities rethink the essay after a year of chatbots. The Riverside Herald. https://riversideherald.com/education/essay-rethink
(Whitcombe, 2024)
In prose: Whitcombe (2024) reports that four departments dropped the take-home essay outright.
Whitcombe, D. (2024, March 3). Universities rethink the essay after a year of chatbots. The Riverside Herald, pp. A1, A6.
In text: (Whitcombe, 2024)
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the references builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What APA needs from a newspaper article
Elements to collect
- Journalist’s name
- Full date of publication — year, month, and day
- Headline of the article
- Name of the newspaper
- Page number for a print article, or the URL for an online one
Rules specific to this entry
- News sources need the full date — year, month, day — because a story is dated to the day it ran. A year alone is not enough for APA to treat it as retrievable.
- The headline is sentence case and upright; the newspaper name is title case and italic, and it keeps its initial “The” when the masthead has one.
- Online articles end at the URL with no page numbers and no retrieval date. Print articles end with pp. and the page numbers, comma-separated when the story jumps: pp. A1, A6.
- A news site with no print edition — a broadcaster’s site, for example — is treated as a website instead: the article title becomes italic and the site name stays upright.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element APA needs for a newspaper article: Journalist’s name; Full date of publication — year, month, and day; Headline of the article; Name of the newspaper.
Build the references entry
Arrange those details in the APA order: Author, A. A. (Year, Month Day). Title of the article in sentence case. Newspaper Name. https://example.com/article
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Whitcombe, 2024) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Whitcombe (2024) reports that four departments dropped the take-home essay outright..
Check it against the exceptions
News sources need the full date — year, month, day — because a story is dated to the day it ran. A year alone is not enough for APA to treat it as retrievable.
APA RULES
The conventions behind every APA entry
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.) is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the references is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the references is sorted, and where APA entries most often go wrong — are collected on the APA 7th edition guide.
The same newspaper article in another style
Switching styles late in a draft is normal. Here is the same source formatted five other ways.
Questions about APA and newspaper articles
What if the newspaper article has no author?
Move the title into the author position and alphabetize by the first significant word of that title — ignoring an initial “A”, “An” or “The”. In the text, use a shortened form of the title where the author name would go.
What do I need before I can cite a newspaper article?
Journalist’s name, Full date of publication — year, month, and day, Headline of the article, and the rest of the elements listed above. News sources need a full date rather than just a year, and the online version of an article rarely carries the page numbers the print version had.
Is there anything unusual about a newspaper article in APA?
News sources need the full date — year, month, day — because a story is dated to the day it ran. A year alone is not enough for APA to treat it as retrievable.
What else catches people out here?
The headline is sentence case and upright; the newspaper name is title case and italic, and it keeps its initial “The” when the masthead has one.
Can I reformat this newspaper article in another style later?
By hand, you would retype the entry — the element order, punctuation and italics all differ between styles. In Copyeditor, sources are stored as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole reference list at once.
Cite it once
and never reformat it again
Copyeditor keeps sources as structured data, so switching between APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE reformats every citation and the whole references at once.
