I am looking for a corpus of UK newspapers that is not topic-specific, contains tabloids and broadsheets, spans the last ten years, and is free to download. (So, not SiBol or NOW.) Any suggestions will be much appreciated.
As indicated by the lack of suggestions, there doesn't seem to be one, so we decided to build our own reference corpus. By the way, it's for this project: https://blogs.edgehill.ac.uk/autismukpressportrayals
we used LexisNexis (now Lexis UK, i think), which Aston Uni had a subscription to, to create our 400+m Climate Change corpus in 2009... we collected newspapers from c 1970s onwards, in BrEng, AmEng, French & German... it took about one month, with the help of 6 MA students.
Costas, this seems to be a great idea. There is a corpus I know of at the Universitat de Valencia (with texts from two Spanish and 2 English newspapers), but it is very small. So we will be looking forward to your reference corpus. It will be great, as usual with the things you do. Please keep ua posted.