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Gazette, Devoir newspaper archives online

Gazette Stanley Cup 1986

The Gazette, May 26, 1986

Mike Rivest points out that archives of The Gazette, from 1878 to 1986, are now available for searching on Google News’s newspaper archive.

For those unfamiliar with the archive, it scans countless newspaper pages, subjects them to optical character recognition, and encodes it all in a vast database. From there, you can search for stuff and it’ll take you right to the newspaper page in question, highlighting the appropriate text.

The system isn’t perfect. Some dates are wrong, some newspapers mislabelled. And the text you’re looking for might have gotten garbled up in the OCR machine.

And not every issue is there, so you might get disappointed if you’re looking for a particular issue or article.

But considering the number of requests daily to The Gazette about accessing old newspaper archives, I’m sure this will come in handy to many. (Kristian Gravenor just creamed his pants, for one)

Some quick searching has found me the Habs’ 1986 Stanley Cup win (above), and these two below:

The Gazette, Oct. 15, 1966: Metro opens, but it's not the main story of the day.

The Gazette, July 21, 1969: Something about a ladder?

There’s also all 172 pages of the bicentennial edition in 1978.

Le Devoir’s archives are also online, though Google’s newspaper search algorithm seeks out block of what it considers legible text, so what comes out are those bits of English that have been published in the newspaper.

Also available are archives from:

Non-Quebec papers include the Toronto Star and Ottawa Citizen.

Happy hunting. (Just remember, if you’re searching for something significant, that newspapers are yesterday’s news, so you have to search for the day after.)

21 thoughts on “Gazette, Devoir newspaper archives online”

  1. Shawn

    The Sunday Express is archived somewhere too. I know because I did a Google search for my long dead father and found article on him…

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  2. David Pinto

    The Gazette front page layout shown — Small step for man … giant leap for mankind

    was laid out by Brodie Snyder, a senior editor back in the day.

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  7. Maria Gatti

    Merde. It means all the francophone paper archives are useless. Pity because even if this is imperfect, it is useful for historical researchers as it means we can narrow stuff down from the relative comfort of our homes (i.e any time of day or night) before trekking off to la Bibliothèque nationale or a university library.

    In my day, I practically wrenched out my eyes on those old microfiches! They were located in the old periodicals annex of la Bibliothéque nationale, corner Esplanade et Mont-Royal, in what was once the Jewish Public Library.

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  13. David Pinto

    There is one interesting aspect that was not mentioned, possibly because it was all so new.
    When you have clicked on a link and a story pops up, you can move your mouse in any direction, and the page will move, meaning you can see hundreds of other items.

    Reply ↓
  14. Murph

    I have much trouble with, and, to say the least, find it rather odd – actually, narrow minded might be the better choice of words here – that the Montreal Gazette, which actually owns the Archives of the Montreal Star, is not allowing, or will not allow, the Montreal Star archives to be posted to this web-site, or “any other” web-site on the Inter-Net. “Yesterday’s news may be old”, and “Old news obviously isn’t new news”, but at least “Old news is still a form of recorded history. And by extension, all forms of history are meant to be read and shared by the world, not just left to rot away in dust covered mildewed and/or moldy file boxes in some basement. And God knows, when one considers the pathetic history – Global “AND” Canadian – that is, and has been, perennially taught in our schools, Canadians need all the goddamn history lessons they can lay their minds on – even if it does have to come from old newspapers.

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    1. Fagstein Post author

      Any idea where the Montreal Star, JdM or La Presse can be found online?

      These papers didn’t participate in the Google newspaper archive. So you have to find their ancient issues the old fashioned way, by going to a library, or by searching a database like those available at the Bibliothèque nationale.

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    1. Fagstein Post author

      How does one print a page from The Gazette archives?

      From the Google newspaper archive, you don’t. Best bet is to go to a local library with Gazette archives and make a copy.

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