Pick out the quote or piece of information you'd like to use in your paper. If you'll be using the quote verbatim, place quotation marks around it. If you're re-writing the quote in your own words (paraphrasing), do not use quotation marks. Remember, any time you borrow a fact or idea for your paper, you need to properly cite it, even if you're using completely different words to explain it. If you don't, you can be accused of plagiarism (stealing other people's ideas and passing them off as your own).
At the end of the quote or paraphrase, include the author's last name and the page number of the magazine in which you found it in parentheses. If you don't know who the author is, use the title of the article or an abbreviated version of the title instead. If you use the title, make sure you place the full title in quotation marks since it's referring to a newspaper article.
For example, if the quote is "five baby elephants were born at the city zoo last year", the article was written by Sherri Sun, and you found the article on page 5 of the newspaper, the cited quote should look like this:
"Five baby elephants were born at the city zoo last year" (Sun 5).
If you paraphrase the quote, it might look something like this:
Just last year, the city zoo welcomed five baby elephants into the world (Sun 5).
If you couldn't find the author of the article, but know that it's called "City Zoo Welcomes Baby Elephants", you could cite the quotation this way:
"Five baby elephants were born at the city zoo last year" ("Zoo Welcomes Elephants" 5).
If you found the article online, you should follow the same citation guidelines. If the online article doesn't contain page numbers, you can refer to a numbered paragraph, section, or division instead, but do not make up your own number. If you need to, it's okay to cite the author or title without a number.
Make sure your citations correspond with your bibliography entry for the newspaper article you used. All MLA papers need to have a bibliography listing all your sources in MLA style. You can find the MLA bibliography format for both print newspapers and online newspapers by visiting the links in the Resources section below.