How the collection is made

The archive aims to be accurate, plainly written and honest about its limits. This page explains how entries are researched, how we handle copyright, and how to reach us with a correction.

Research method

Each entry begins with the public record of a well-documented event and the newspapers that reported it. We cross-check dates, mastheads, place of publication and the wording of headlines against multiple accounts before an entry is published. Where sources disagree — and for events a century old they often do — we say so in the text rather than smoothing the difference away.

On copyright and images

We deliberately do not host scanned reproductions of copyrighted newspaper pages. Every front page in the archive is a typographic reconstruction: an original plate that recreates the layout and headline of a historical edition without copying the publisher’s scanned artwork or photography. Newspaper titles are named for identification and historical accuracy only. No endorsement by, or affiliation with, any named publication is claimed or implied.

What we count as a front page

The archive is interested in the front page as a decision, not merely as a container of news. An entry is chosen when the page did more than report — when the choice of banner headline, the size of the type or the placement of a single line tells you how the country was being asked to understand a morning. That is why the collection is small and uneven across the decades: it follows the mornings that mattered rather than the calendar, and it leaves the complete daily record to the libraries and archives equipped to hold it.

Dating and datelines

Each entry carries the date its front page was published, which is not always the date of the event. For older stories the gap is real and deliberate: news crossed the Atlantic by cable, cleared military or wartime censors, and reached Canadian newsrooms hours or days later. Where that lag matters to how the page reads, the entry says so. The dateline reconstructed on each plate reflects the published edition, so the archive preserves not just what happened but when readers actually learned of it.

Acknowledgements

The archive is indebted to the public libraries, provincial archives and newspaper institutions across Canada whose long work of preservation makes projects like this one possible. Their reading rooms, digitisation programmes and finding aids are where the memory of the country’s front pages is genuinely kept; this site is only a small, curated doorway to that larger record.

Corrections & contact

If you find an error, or you hold rights you believe are affected by an entry, please write to [email protected]. We read every message and correct confirmed errors promptly. Requests from rights holders are handled quickly and in good faith.