Newspapers.com vs British Newspaper Archive?

[bugbear]

With 1 billion pages, newspapers.com is now doing a 50% offer on subs.

I know that a lot of its content is USA-ian biased.

Does anyone know how its UK coverage compares to the BNA?

On raw page count, NP has around 50 million vs 83 million at the BNA, but page count and quality of coverage are not the same thing.

[Pennines]

Thank you for raising this query, bugbear.

I have been wondering the same thing and hope some clever person knows the answer.

[martin hooper]

I think it depend on the geographical areas that you're interested in. I've just had a quick look and I can see that for some of my areas it has some pages that go back much earlier than BNA. But in other areas there's nothing of interest. I might go for it just to be able to look at the coverage that is better than BNA.

Martin

[Pennines]

Thank you for your reply Martin -- if you do take the plunge it would be great if you don't mind letting us know what you think please.

[Biggles50]

I would not sign up for anything other than a single month, sign up and cancel auto renewal straight away.

Blitz the content to get all the info you need, for me in a week or so I had all the info that I need.

BNA dot com was much better for UK articles, and againI subscribed and turned off auto renewal and in the month I had exhausted all the records.

An alternative is to sign up with FindMyPast on as good a deal as you can get and use their Newspapers and 1921 census etc.   This is my current setup although I do not use it for hints etc just back to back searches and so far it fails to report on many that Ancestry does report so I am glad I maintained Ancestry and when my FindMyPast subscription expires I will have zero need for it ever again.

[Chris Doran]

As Martin says, it depends on your individual interests. On both sites, you don't have to pay to just browse what's available or even to search. In some spot checks for me, I found that newspapers.com had fewer years in most of the 'papers I'm interested in and it doesn't have one that BNA has at all. So if/when I have time to make intensive use of a sub, I'd go for BNA, which is a bit cheaper anyway (current offer excluded).

You may find one or both available free to residents at a library in your area, often even online, or you may have to go to the central one or archives/local studies/heritage centre, whatever it's called.

Both have free weekends (BNA through FindMyPast) from time to time, usually announced on this forum, Find a Grave's Research Resources Forum and no doubt others. The trick is to keep a list of what you want to look up, and maybe do some free searches, ready for the great day.

[Pennines]

Thank you both for your views. Very much appreciated.

I do subscribe to BNA -- but just wondered if I was missing anything!!

Think I will just stick with BNA.

Many thanks again.

[SouthseaSteel]

Not a lot to add to other posters.  I subscribe to them both and find them both pretty similar and equally useful and frustrating.  I'd estimate they overlap by about 75% of UK content with either one having some material the other doesnt.  Of course that could be the critical info you are specifically after!!  Newspapers.com is integrated with Ancestry which has its uses whilst I quite like the (new) search engine at FindMyPast for the BNA.  Of course newspapers.com is the one to use for US material and it has helped me out on Ozzie stuff too

[bugbear]

Aus and NZ both have extensive FREE newspaper archives;

https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/advanced/category/newspapers

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers%3f