With nearly 3.2 billion searchable documents, available indexed and with abstracts, you probably can save a lot of time with Lexis-Nexis. Advanced search features let you peruse headlines and lead paragraphs of stories. You can further narrow your search by looking for a given time frame, by author or in only one periodical. If you are new to the service, you can take a course over the phone. Customer support is free.
Searches are free, but there is a small fee to retrieve articles.
Another service is Electric Library, which searches more than 150 newspapers and hundreds of magazines, photos, and television and radio transcripts. Or you can use advanced features, such as searching by date, publication, title or author. Your first month of Electric Library is free. If you don't find what you're looking for, there's always the option of getting out of your chair and heading to a real library. The Web is only one tool on your research tool belt.