Look for the article's author. According to a document about MLA style written for students by librarians at the Ontario College of Art and Design, author information needs to be included in parenthetical citations when it is available. Articles released by large news networks (such as the Associated Press) do not always have authors listed.
Note the pagination of the newspaper. Many newspapers are numbered by section and page number (for example, A2, where A is the section and 2 is the page number). If you found your newspaper article online, only include page number references that will be consistent for every page visitor. For example, some newspapers divide a single article's content between multiple pages online, providing links at the bottom for navigation. Others present the entire news story on one screen. In the second case, you would not note page numbers in your in-text citation, even if the article printed out on multiple pages. How content gets distributed among printed pages depends on computer settings and is not always the same.
Create your in-text citation. If your article has the author and the page number, place the information in brackets in the following format (Smith A2). If no author is noted, include the name of the article in quotation marks instead: ("Man, 28, Robs New York City Bank" A2). If you're dealing with an online source without consistent page numbers, leave them out in your citation. Your citation would be (Smith) for an article with an author but no page numbers, and ("Man, 28, Robs New York City Bank") for an article with no author or page numbers.
Add your punctuation. Remember that punctuation always comes after the second parentheses of your in-text citation. For example:
Recent items in the news provide evidence of how dangerous U.S. urban centers can be. Just last month, a young man robbed a bank branch in New York City at gunpoint, injuring both customers and staff members (Smith A2).
As implied in a recent New York Times article discussing the recent spike in bank robberies (Smith A2), New York City needs to do more to control organized crime.