Reporting on New York City: Factiva for News
Factiva
Factiva is one of the largest news aggregators available with more than 30,000 sources in 32 languages, including many major national and international publications, local news, newswires, and business sources. See the Full Title List for all sources. Coverage dates vary by publication but Factiva is best for current and recent news.
Classic Factiva Interface
To get started with advanced searching, log in to Factiva. Use the Free Text Search box at the top of the page to enter search terms. Here's an example query, looking for articles on New York City's 2024 minimum pay rule for delivery workers (see below for a list of search operators):
Alternatively, use the options below the Free Text Search box to narrow your search further, such as choosing a Date range, limiting to specific Sources, or selecting a Region or Language:
Factiva by default searches any words next together as an exact phrase. For example, a search for gowanus canal superfund site will only return articles in which those four words appear in that exact order. To find a broader range of articles, alternative searches might be gowanus canal AND superfund or gowanus near5 superfund.
On the search results page, Factiva defaults to showing articles by "Most recent first." Change the Sort By dropdown menu to "Oldest" or "Relevance" to change how the results display. Use the filters on the left to narrow the search results further, such as by Companies mentioned, people mentioned ("Executives" filter), Author, Language, and other options.
New Factiva Interface
In September 2024, Factiva introduced a new search interface. This new interface is an "AI-powered search that leverages natural language processing to provide contextually relevant results. It looks at the context and intent of the queries, rather than just keywords." This interface is meant to be accessible to a wider range of users, allowing for phrase searching and misspellings/typos. However, the features and filters are currently much more limited; the classic interface is best for advanced searching with a variety of search operators and filters.
The new interface is available by clicking the "Switch Factiva" button in the upper right.
Search Operators
Below are some common search operators used to created focused search queries. A full list can be found by clicking the Examples link to the left of the Free Text Search box on the Factiva search page.
| Operator | Purpose | Example |
| AND | Include both terms | bicycle AND trail |
| OR | Include either term | bicycle OR bike |
| NOT | Exclude this term | bike NOT ebike |
| ( ) | Nest terms to organize a search with multiple operators | (bicycle OR bike) AND trail |
| * | Truncation to allow for variant endings, returning any words that begin with the letters before the * | elect* [returns elect, elects, election, electoral, etc.] |
| ? | Wildcard to allow for variant letters, returning words with any letter in the ? place | globali?ation [returns globalization and globalisation] |
| atleast# | Must have at least # mentions of a term (use numbers 1-50) | atleast5 mayor |
| same | Terms must appear in the same paragraph | mayor same election |
| near# | Terms must appear within # words of one another, in any order (use numbers 1-500) | president near3 obama |
| /F#/ | Term must appear within the first # words of an article (use numbers 1-500) | mayor/F50/ |
| wc># | Word count must be greater than # words, to return longer articles | president obama wc>2000 |