Online technology now provides the press-focused social science researcher with an accessible and fast means of selecting newspaper articles for analysis. Taking examples from their experiences of using both hard copy newspapers and online output, the authors argue that whilst computer searches of newspapers are often appropriate, there are problems with the current technology. In particular, the relationships between graphics, the spatial location of stories and the accompanying text are not discernible from online output. This is problematic for research using newspapers as a data source where such relationships may be central.