It's a subscription service, but it's available to schools, colleges and universities, libraries, and any business that wants it. An individual could subscribe, though a person could go broke.

Proquest is less expensive than Lexis-Nexis, and less of a pain to use, but there's more information on Lexis once you figure out how to search it. Lexis-Nexis usually charges by the minute, so quick searching is essential.

The ProQuest package to which I have access is a K12-general public kind of bundle. It can be tweaked to include other stuff; for instance, colleges will include a larger number of peer reviewed journals, and businesses have their own set of professional resources that would not get enough use to be worthwhile for the customer base we serve in the K12-general public world. Also, organizations can buy regional packages: major newspapers from all over, plus all the participating regional newspapers in the region, which in my case would be the MidAtlantic region. We have access to 2256 magazines and newspapers, much in full text going back to the late 1990s, and some even to the 1980s. I'm looking at a page with 134 fulltext articles from today's WSJ.

What's really fun about it is the fact that searches can be so refined. One can search by publication, by date ranges, by type of article, by image caption, and in complex searches combining these factors and other more prosaic ones like article title, author, subject and keyword. I can search the papers in my county and the two ajacent counties for an obituary in a specific date range featuring part of a last name (in case I'm not sure if it's spelled "ie" or "ei"). I can search for reviews of movies and specify I want only the bad reviews, or the good ones. So many articles, so little time.

Part of the deal, of course, is to honor copyright. Violators will be prosecuted.

The California State Library has links to a suite of databases, such as EBSCOhost, which includes 2250 general-interest magazines and newspapers in the bundle we have, along with 7,400 business publications and lots of health and education stuff as well. I would be surprised if California were behind Pennsylvania. I mean, we're around #40 in state per capita spending for libraries, and even we have this.

I also notice that the San Francisco Public Library offers ProQuest. For some reason, I can't open the San Jose Public Library's home page, but it's a big place and probably offers a lot in the way of databases too.

Many libraries will offer non-residents a card for a fee, and that card will include remote access to databases. Maybe you want to shop around.