← Covering Palestine

Contribute a clipping

The archive holds 2,060 clippings from 695 newspapers, 1799 to 2023. It is one person’s reach, and that is its limit rather than its boundary. If you hold something printed before 7 October 2023 with Palestinians in it, it belongs here.

Nothing is published unverified, and nothing is published without being checked against the scan itself.

What the archive takes

Printed before 7 October 2023Any date up to and including 6 October 2023. The archive stops the day before, on purpose, so that nothing in it can be read as a response to what came after.
A newspaper, magazine or wire dispatchPrinted matter with a masthead and a date. Any country, any language — the collection is American so far because that is what one person could reach, not because the rest does not count.
Palestinians in itThe clipping has to be about Palestinians, or carry them in it somewhere, even as a subordinate clause. Some of the most useful records in the archive are the ones where they appear for three words and then disappear.
A photograph of the actual pageNot a retyped transcript and not a database printout. The page itself, with its masthead and its neighbours visible if you can manage it, because what ran beside a story is often the finding.

What it does not

Anything printed after 6 October 2023It will not be added. This is the one rule with no exceptions.
Screenshots of websitesOnline-only articles have no page, no masthead and no fixed edition. Print or wire copy only.
Clippings you cannot sourceIf you do not know the paper and the date, it cannot be verified, and unverified material is worse than none.
Social media posts, broadcasts, transcriptsAll worth collecting. Not by this archive, which is about what was set in type.

What to send with it

The scanAs large a file as you have. A phone photograph of a microfilm reader is fine if it is legible.
The paperAs printed on the masthead, not as you know it today.
The dateThe printed publication date. If the clipping carries a dateline as well, send both — they often disagree, and the disagreement is useful.
The page numberIf the scan shows it. A story on A1 and the same story on A14 are two different editorial decisions.
Where you found itA library, a database, a family album, an attic. This is how the next person finds it again.
How you want to be creditedYour name as you want it printed, or tell us you would rather not be named.

If you only have some of this, send it anyway. A scan with a legible masthead carries most of the rest inside it, and the date can usually be settled from the page: the printed weekday is the arbiter whenever a caption and a dateline disagree.

What happens to it

  1. You send itEmail, with the scan attached. Nothing is published at this point.
  2. It gets verifiedThe paper, the date and the page are checked against the scan itself — the masthead, the printed weekday, the dateline. Roughly one clipping in twenty arrives with a date that the page it is printed on contradicts. That gets resolved before anything else happens.
  3. It gets transcribedThe text is read off the scan by OCR and corrected against the image. Headlines are recorded as printed, including the capitals.
  4. It gets a recordAn accession number, a page of its own, a permanent URL, and your name on it if you want one.
  5. Or it does notSome things will be declined, and you will be told why. Usually it is a date that cannot be confirmed, or a scan too dark to read. Neither is a judgment about the clipping.

Send it

Email the scan with the details above. Every submission is read by a person, and you will get an answer either way.

Email a clipping →

Or write to maria@rozumstudio.com directly.

Credit: contributors are named on the record page of the clipping they sent, unless they ask not to be. The clipping itself stays what it always was — a page from a newspaper, which nobody owns and anybody may read.

Collected, transcribed and researched by Maria Robles. Method and sources · Start here · Instagram · The archive