My local newspaper (in Sweden) does this. All subscriber has access on the web to the archive back to 1910. Very useful and fun to browse ex. birthdays or things from the world wars.

For starters: https://news.google.com/newspapers and https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

I wonder if there are any non-profit archival bodies that would partner with a tech org on such a venture. Finding a non-profit tech org that could do it in a sound way might be challenging*

Perhaps a Google project like the books scanning they did? That would be really cool.

* it doesn't have to be non-profit tech org of course (I did mention google's book project after all), but finding a for-profit that would make things freely available might be a challenge in itself since the costs would not likely be low, either for development or infrastructure/maintenance.

If you have a library card, you can get past many of those paywalls, at least in the U.S.

The library systems in the last two places I lived both subscribed to services where when you put your library card number in, you could browse the archives of hundreds of newspapers, magazines and journals. Some of them going back into the 1800's.

There's also "Chronicling America" - it's a federal government (Library of Congress) web site that has full page scans of 500 different newspapers from 1836-1922. Free and open to everyone in the world: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov

Yeah in the 90s I remember using them for free to read old articles. Then once the internet comes around suddenly it's paywalled and $3 per issue.