Abstract

Newspaper reporters routinely occupied the galleries of the adversarial and inquisitorial courts at the beginning of the twentieth century but whether their shorthand progressed to publication and into the public domain was sensitive to many factors. Newsworthy cases were self-selecting; headlines could be quickly constituted from verdicts and riders, and the verbatim replication of proceedings provided editors with ready content safe from libel. Scholars of Ireland rely heavily on digitized newspapers as surrogate sources for legal records destroyed in 1922, but the extent to which they can be used in that respect merits further and detailed research. This article takes a case study approach to show the methodological challenges faced by historians dealing with partial archival pasts and why digitized newspapers should be used with great caution. Using a sample of cases from Irish coronial court registers, it traces newspaper coverage over the course of a census year to ascertain discernible patterns. With a particular focus on suicide, it exposes the problems associated with using digitized newspapers in historical research, the limitations of search engine capacities, as well as the necessity for more critical analysis of the embedded gender and class biases that influenced editorial decisions.