I am likewise a historian/author who relies on newspaper archives for a lot of my research. I have been maintaining my site for 17+ years, and if one visits my older writings, many of the source links are long dead.

Of course there is the Internet Archive, but if one looks into the stewardship of that project, it is quite vulnerable in the long term. There are key people whose departures would compromise the viability of the project. Perhaps we need the digital equivalent of the Svaldbard seed vault for digital archives--a state-maintained facility storing the bulk of Internet history in a geologically stable server farm.