A lot of information about a company can be extracted from news releases, white papers and periodical publications. The most useful sites I have found include:

• Proquest – (sometimes listed as Wall Street Journal Historical Newspaper) the “king” of the news is usually availabe through a university and/or library. This database includes a full range of articles that can be searched according to a time frame.
• LexisNexis – data quality is just as good as Proquest, just has a trickier user interface. Lexis probably has actually more data than Proquest, but one must know how to find it. Even trying to search within a date range can be a little tricky (look on the advanced tab as the basic tab only lets you search within a two year time frame but the advanced lets you expand your options).
• Factiva – another great database of news articles that usually requires some type of log-in.
• Business & Company Database – this database pulls up a lot of links, but doesn’t seem to provide the full text very often, being quite useless for research reasons.
• Company website – an obvious resource for press releases, but one must beware of bias. Often companies in certain tech industries will upload analyst reports.