Chemical and engineering news is not a technical journal, its a news branch of the American Chemical Society which analyzes the news from a science angle, summarizes technical articles, and interviews scientists.
A technical journal would be something like the Journal of The American Chemical Society or Nano Letters. If you have trouble getting access to a specific article I would be happy to help you.
Each of these journals has a link to articles which are their most most read of the year, and this would be a good place to poke around. In the abstract or introduction of the article the authors will typically mention why their work is beneficial to the field at large.
I'm not trying to be pretentious but you are probably going to have a lot of trouble reading these types of technical articles. They are written at the very highest level and are chock full of difficult jargon and abbreviations. I consider myself an experienced journal reader and I still have to fight through anything that isn't in my field.
You should ask your teacher if instead of a technical journal you can instead use C&EN, it will be much more digestible.