hey so, i wanna go down a kind of deranged rabbit hole, as i sometimes wanna do, and i need to be able to browse local nyc news through the 1960s, but doing that is gated behind a lot of paywalls as far as i can tell
i really don’t have the fucking funds to drop on archive access, so i’m wondering how people get around this?
I happen to live in a different big metro but i can’t imagine their archives are either easy to access nor worth the hassle of travelling 2 hours via transit to check out, but i guess i will if i have to.
hoping hexbear has solutions
microfiche at the local library
In addition to this, libraries often have services you can use to browse online archives.
adding on my own comment - if the paper was large enough it got put on microfiche.
Used to use them all the time for book reports etc.
A bunch of states have sites like this for research purposes - I’ve used Colorado’s and Virginia’s before, too. New Jersey doesn’t have a good free one last I checked.
Edit - You may also be interested in this novel. Some occasional anti-communist nonsense (the author had an uneasy relationship with the East German government, and the main character is an emigre) but the daily grind of “New York newspapers in the 1960s” is a huge part of the book. (Anna’s Archive, but it’s very long so you might prefer a physical copy.)
archive.org has a fair amount. lemme see if they have 60s nyt or something
edit: weirdly no? seems like 60s is a deadzone
My library gives rolling access to NYT archives using my library card information, might be worth looking into. Came in handy when I was fact checking manufacturing consent during my early radicalization.
