Two columns but not for entire document

Question

My goal is for my document to have a standard article documentclass to use the pages for an essay setting, but at the end I need to include newspaper articles and would like to format the latter pages as two columns for these newspaper articles. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I should approach this? Tables are not reasonable for obvious reasons and I am not sure what other tools are at my disposal.

So generally I would like to format my document as

Essay Body

References

(Two Column Start)

Articles

(Two Column End)

Edit:

Can I force all of the remainder into the left column only instead of having it balance? Also can I increase the space between the columns slightly?

Answer 1

You can use the multicol package. Add \usepackage{multicol} to your document preamble, and wrap the text you want in columns in \begin{multicols}{n} and \end{multicols} where n is the number of columns. For more information, see the package documentation.

However, you cannot use floats that span just one column; multicol can only handle the starred float environments, which span both columns.

The multicol package automatically balances the columns; if you don't want this, use the multicols* envoironment.