An English-language thesis at a Swiss, German, or Austrian university still runs on local news: an NZZ report on a cantonal vote, a Süddeutsche Zeitung piece on a city budget, a FAZ commentary, Der Standard or Die Zeit for the longer view, sometimes the Financial Times on the same story. The reference is short. The failures are specific: a Google News URL, a year with no day, a paywall teaser treated as the article, and a news write-up used as if it were the study it mentions.
The bylines and headlines below are invented. The newspapers are real. For a German-language article, APA 7 keeps the original headline and adds an English translation in square brackets, as in the first example below; the other examples show only an English headline to stay short. How to mark a translation in the body is covered under citing translated sources.
A journal article is not a newspaper article
A journal article carries an author, a year, an article title, a journal, a volume, an issue, pages, and usually a DOI. That pattern is in the APA 7 citation guide. A newspaper article carries an author, a full date (month and day, not the year alone), a headline, the name of the paper, and a page or a URL. No volume, no issue, and almost never a DOI.
Dressing an NZZ piece up as volume 12, issue 3, with a DOI that resolves nowhere, tells an examiner you filed the source in the wrong drawer. They see it in the reference list before they look for the article.
Print and online
Print and online are often the same reporting. They are not the same reference.
Print has a page. Put it in the reference, and in the in-text citation when you quote. Without it, nobody can find the column in Saturday’s paper.
Online has a URL, and it is the paper’s URL, not the page that delivered the story to you. Web articles often have no page numbers. APA lets you use a paragraph number (para. 4) when the paragraphs are stable. On a page that reflows, leave the locator out rather than inventing a page from your own printout.
URLs move. How to keep an archive copy is covered under avoiding link rot. The general fields for web sources are in citing internet sources.
Magazines and weeklies
Der Spiegel, The Economist, and NZZ Folio are magazines. They usually have an issue number, sometimes a volume. Include the issue when it is printed on the copy you read.
Die Zeit is a weekly newspaper. The publication date does more work than a volume. Add the issue number only when the masthead prints one. Do not invent a volume so the entry looks like a journal.
How to cite a newspaper article in APA 7
In the reference list, APA 7 puts the date after the author, the headline in roman type, and the newspaper title in italics. The date order inside the reference is American — (2024, March 15) — even when the rest of your thesis uses British day-month order. In the text, (Vogt, 2024) is enough. Two pieces by the same author in the same year take a and b. A quotation from the printed paper adds the page: (Vogt, 2024, p. 12). In the reference itself the page stands without “p.”
Printed daily:
Vogt, L. (2024, March 15). Pendlerströme in der Agglomeration Zürich [Commuter flows in the Zurich agglomeration]. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 12.
Online, on the publisher’s site:
Keller, J. (2025, February 3). Municipalities cut the night bus. Süddeutsche Zeitung. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/…
No author. The headline moves to the author position. In the text, quote the first few words:
Rail operator postpones the timetable change. (2024, November 8). Neue Zürcher Zeitung. https://www.nzz.ch/…
(“Rail Operator Postpones,” 2024)
Wire service instead of a byline. Reuters, dpa, Keystone-SDA, or AP is the author when the piece is signed that way. A bare “newsroom” credit is treated as no author, unless your style sheet says otherwise.
Keystone-SDA. (2024, November 8). Rail operator postpones the timetable change. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. https://www.faz.net/…
When the dispatch lives only on the agency’s own site, and the agency and the website are the same name, do not repeat the name. The headline is italicised, because the piece is a standalone page rather than an article inside another paper:
Reuters. (2025, February 3). Municipalities cut the night bus. https://www.reuters.com/…
Weekly newspaper:
Feldmann, M. (2025, June 12). Why cantons count public transport differently. Die Zeit, 18.
Magazine with an issue number (the number is invented, like the article):
Feldmann, M. (2025, June 14). Why cantons count public transport differently. Der Spiegel, (25), 42–44.
Harvard
Harvard is a family of author-date styles, not one codebook. Author, year, title, newspaper, full date, page or URL will satisfy most sheets. Commas, “available at”, and the access date are local. The shared rules are in the Harvard referencing guide. Day-month order in the Harvard entry is normal in an English thesis, even though APA keeps month-day.
In the text: (Vogt 2024, p. 12)
Print:
Vogt, L. (2024) ‘Commuter flows and the night bus’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 15 March, p. 12.
Online. Many handouts want an access date on every URL, including ones APA would leave undated:
Keller, J. (2025) ‘Municipalities cut the night bus’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 February. Available at: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/… (Accessed: 13 October 2026).
No author. Prefer the agency when one is signed. When the piece names nobody, most English handouts start the entry with the headline:
‘Rail operator postpones the timetable change’ (2024) Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 8 November.
Footnotes: Chicago and German note style
History, cultural studies, and parts of law cite in notes. Whether your programme wants notes or brackets is the choice in footnotes versus in-text citations. The first note is complete. The next one is short. Punctuation follows the sheet; the skeleton does not change.
First note:
- Lena Vogt, “Commuter Flows and the Night Bus,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 15, 2024, 12.
Short note:
- Vogt, “Commuter Flows,” 12.
Bibliography, when the sheet wants one beside the notes:
Vogt, Lena. “Commuter Flows and the Night Bus.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 15, 2024.
Online, add the publisher URL. A live blog also gets the day you read it.
Paywalls, Factiva, and which URL to give
A paywall does not create a different source. It only changes how you reached the text. You cite the article you read, not the three sentences in front of the gate.
| How you got it | What goes in the reference |
|---|---|
| Publisher site, including behind a login | The article URL on nzz.ch, sueddeutsche.de, faz.net, derstandard.at, zeit.de, ft.com. Drop session parameters such as ?token= |
| Swissdox, Factiva, Nexis, Wiso, or PressReader only | Newspaper, date, and page from the record, as for print. APA 7 leaves the database out; some Harvard handouts want its name. Not the results-list URL, and not a link that dies when your login ends |
| Google News, MSN, Apple News | None of these. Open the story on the outlet’s site and cite that version |
| Print only | The page. No URL |
Prefer the publisher URL even if you read the piece through the library. It identifies the article. When no stable publisher address exists, APA 7 cites the article like print: newspaper, date, page, no database and no URL. Name Swissdox or Factiva only when your Harvard handout or department requires the route you used. The newspaper stays the source. “Factiva” and “Google News” do not. Citing the teaser means citing a passage you have not read. Open the article or drop the citation.
Updated stories and live blogs
Outlets stamp “updated” under the headline. A typo fix leaves the original date in place. If the claim you use changed — a figure, a quotation, an outcome — cite the date of the version you read. APA 7 simply uses that date; “updated” does not go into the reference.
A live blog is not a fixed page. APA 7 wants a retrieval date for sources designed to change, placed before the URL:
Keller, J. (2026, March 4). Regional rail strike [Live blog]. Tages-Anzeiger. Retrieved March 4, 2026, from https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/…
APA asks for no time of day. Keep the time in your own notes anyway when the blog updates by the minute.
Use a permalink to one update when the page offers it. Otherwise save an archive snapshot once the blog moves on.
Opinion columns and interviews published in the paper
A commentary, op-ed, or column has a person behind it. The paper is the container. In your sentence, Solms holds the view. “The FAZ has shown” does not.
Solms, H. (2025, June 2). The city does not need the night bus [Opinion]. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. https://www.faz.net/…
[Opinion] is not an APA requirement. It stops a reader from treating a column as a news report.
An interview published in a newspaper is authored by the journalist who asked, cut, and framed it. The interviewee belongs in the title, not in the author slot.
Vogt, L. (2025, April 11). Interview with Rita Baumgartner on the night bus. Neue Zürcher Zeitung. https://www.nzz.ch/…
In the text the citation stays with Vogt, because that article is what you read: the director ties the night bus to municipal funding (Vogt, 2025). An interview you conducted yourself is a different source. That format is in citing expert interviews.
When a newspaper article is an acceptable source
A newspaper is often a primary source for the coverage itself: how an event became public, which words the headline used, or what someone told that paper. As context for a development that has no scholarly article yet, it holds — as context, not as theory.
It is a secondary source as soon as the article only retells a study, a statistic, or a judgment. “A study shows”, printed in the NZZ, is not a citation of that result. You find the study and cite it. The same applies to a figure from the Federal Statistical Office, Destatis, or Eurostat, and to a ruling the paper summarises: the official publication or the decision is the source. Drop the article, or mark a secondary citation if the original really cannot be obtained. If the piece points at a report or a working paper, that document follows the rules for grey literature.
A column documents its author’s position, not the facts of the case. Three news articles are not a literature review. They show that a topic was public.
Mistakes that show up in the reference list
Citing the aggregator. Google News, MSN, and Apple News are not the paper. The reference points at the publisher.
The year alone. (Vogt, 2024) is fine in the text. The reference needs month and day.
The teaser. The sentences in front of the paywall are not the article.
The database as the author. “Swissdox” or “Factiva” does not replace the newspaper.
Volume and DOI on a newspaper. That is the journal pattern. A daily does not have it.
“No author” when an agency signed. If Keystone-SDA or dpa is on the piece, that is the author.
A column cited as news. A guest essay is an argument. The citation names the person.
An unchecked Zotero import. The connector often saves a newspaper page as a generic webpage, with today’s date and no newspaper title. Check date, outlet, and URL against the article.
Before you submit
- For each article, you know whether you are citing print, the publisher’s site, or an archive record only — and the reference matches that version.
- Month and day are in the reference, not the year alone.
- The URL is the publisher’s, without tracking or login parameters. No Google News link.
- Archive copies from Swissdox, Factiva, Nexis, Wiso, or PressReader are cited like print in APA 7; the database is named only where your handout asks for it.
- Live blogs and updated stories carry the date of the version you read and, where the page keeps changing, a retrieval date.
- Columns and published interviews are credited to the person who owns the text.
- No study, statistic, or judgment is cited only through the paper’s retelling.
Whether the date, the outlet, and the URL belong together is the pass in how to check your citations. Whether a sentence in your thesis is in the article you upload is what Acurio compares. It does not fetch the paper, and it does not decide whether your department accepts a newspaper as a source.
Publisher URL rather than the aggregator, the day rather than the year alone, the text you read rather than the teaser, and the study itself once the article is only narrating it. That is what makes the citation hold the sentence.