Boy there's a lot of making out going on around here.
it's not in the public domain (I think the counter is all the way up to 1923 on that? At any rate, way before the 60s...), and the newspaper's current existence doesn't matter either way. HOWEVER, the kind of brief quotation you're describing is widely considered to be fair use even though the material is copyrighted
See, I can never remember how far back it goes-- whether it's fifty years or seventy-five or if it's something that's set by a certain year rather than a passage of time. I know that with song lyrics, we've been very strongly cautioned against using even small snippets and attempting to invoke "fair use" however, I suspect it's something that varies from house to house.
Write what you want, keep a list of where the headlines come from, and let the publisher's rights office sweat it if they worried that the use isn't fair.
Definitely.
if you spread your headlines among different papers and don't copy any of the article that goes with them, it's going to be considered de minimis -- the courts won't concern themselves with a trifle.
So noted. I was planning on using different papers anyhow, so this is good.
If only I was happy with little three weeks later leads. Oy.
Signed,
Makes life difficult for herself
::wanders off in search of a grope::