Hi folks!  I'm looking for suggestions on a prop newspaper.  I was simply going to use pages from the local rag, but each and every page has tons and tons of advertising on it ... not quite historical looking for Little Women. 

If you have a bookstore or other place that sells newspapers you can usually find papers from all over the country (and world).  We have a store called "Border Books" which offers newspapers from around the U.S. and many of them come in different styles that may fit the format that you are looking for.  As topper has mentioned you can have someone change the headlines and nameplates and then "age" it with diluted tea.  Make sure you dye each page separately and allow to fully dry on a flat surface or hanging over a ladder rung or other such hanging device.

Just a tip aging paper with tea, is better acomplished using a damp teabag & dabbing it on. This is a method all  the better forgers prefer.

I haven't been satisfied with any of the options available online. Either they're hopelessly fake, or they're the real thing and so yellowed no self-respecting character would have bought them as new that day!

If you have InDesign or PageMaker and a little time, you can make newspapers to order, as I do. A little browsing online will yield low-resolution images of photos and ads from the period you're looking for, and sometimes pictures of the actual paper, in which case you know exactly how you want the result to look.

Sometimes the script of the show will mention the title of the newspaper, so you want to be able to get that right, which you can't do if you just print out whatever period-appropriate image comes to hand. Sometimes headlines are also specified. For other headlines I usually go to the New York Times archives (and whatever other archives I can find) for actual headlines from the specified year. InDesign and PageMaker also have "filler text," which looks like real language but doesn't say anything (so the actor isn't distracted!).

I have a printer that accepts paper up to A3 width, which I think is 14". The publishing software lets you do custom paper sizes, but I generally use the Tabloid settings. Vertical, that size will work for the front (or back) of a tabloid; Horizontal, it has plenty of room for the top (or bottom) half of a full-size newspaper page.

The antique shops around here use newsprint paper for wrapping purchases, and they are generous with unused sheets whenever I ask. There is no need to tea-stain paper--the newsprint is newspaper-colored and will blend in perfectly with the actual newspaper pages I use for filler and for the base of the outer pages. Newsprint is also thin and soft enough to read and feel like a single page even when pasted onto a base.

I glue "my" newspaper pages onto actual newspapers, both front page and back page. I use glue sticks, not rubber cement or other paper glue, because they don't stretch the paper as much.

The increasing challenge is finding appropriate-size real newspapers to use for the base and fill pages. Most papers have gotten so ridiculously narrow, and many papers are now using more and more color pages. You might think about subscribing to the Newtown Bee (Newtown, CT), which is still using wide pages (a bit wider than even what the Times used to be) and has only spot-color section titles and the like. For tabloids I use a newsletter I edit, which is very text-dense and is completely black-and-white except for the masthead. Anyway, that base size is the only glitch in this system.

My newspapers have been seen (and the actors are actually likely to flash them around!) in The Glass Menagerie, Juno and the Paycock, Arcadia, Laura, Driving Miss Daisy, The Best Man....I'm currently doing a few Variety issues for Moonlight and Magnolias. Actors comment that having such real papers in their hands deepens their own sense of the scene; stage managers say the actors get very possessive of the papers they use and usually request them as souvenirs after the show closes.