Harvard referencing
How to cite a newspaper article in Harvard referencing
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 Harvard, at a glance
Author, A. (Year) ‘Headline’, Name of Newspaper, Day Month, p. 00.
Vance, D. (2023) ‘City halts sale of riverside depot’, Calder Evening Herald, 3 March, p. 4.
(Vance, 2023, p. 4)
In prose: Vance (2023, p. 4) reported the council vote the morning after it happened.
Vance, D. (2023) ‘City halts sale of riverside depot’, Calder Evening Herald, 3 March. Available at: https://www.calderherald.com/riverside-depot (Accessed: 5 March 2024).
In text: (Vance, 2023)
Copyeditor formats APA, MLA, Chicago and IEEE automatically — cite a source once and the reference list builds itself. See how citations work .
BEFORE YOU FORMAT
What Harvard 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
- The year sits with the author, but the day and month sit later in the entry, after the newspaper’s name. Splitting the date across two positions is peculiar to news sources and easy to get wrong.
- Newspaper titles keep title case even in guides that ask for sentence case on the article headline.
- An online article replaces the page number with “Available at: … (Accessed: …)”, because the web edition has no stable pagination.
- For an unsigned article, most guides move the newspaper’s name into the author slot; a few start with the headline instead. Either way the in-text citation must match whatever opens the entry.
Building the entry, step by step
Collect the details
Before you format anything, gather every element Harvard 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 reference list entry
Arrange those details in the Harvard order: Author, A. (Year) ‘Headline’, Name of Newspaper, Day Month, p. 00.
Add the in-text citation
In the body of your paper, cite it as (Vance, 2023, p. 4) — or work the same reference into your sentence as Vance (2023, p. 4) reported the council vote the morning after it happened..
Check it against the exceptions
The year sits with the author, but the day and month sit later in the entry, after the newspaper’s name. Splitting the date across two positions is peculiar to news sources and easy to get wrong.
Harvard RULES
The conventions behind every Harvard entry
your institution’s Harvard style guide — Harvard has no single governing manual is the authority. Where a journal or department publishes its own house rules, those win — check your submission guidelines before the reference list is final.
The rules that apply across every source — author order, capitalization, how the reference list is sorted, and where Harvard entries most often go wrong — are collected on the Harvard referencing 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 Harvard 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 Harvard?
The year sits with the author, but the day and month sit later in the entry, after the newspaper’s name. Splitting the date across two positions is peculiar to news sources and easy to get wrong.
What else catches people out here?
Newspaper titles keep title case even in guides that ask for sentence case on the article headline.
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 reference list at once.
