In case this is useful to anyone, there's lots of digitised newspapers freely available in the Library of Congress: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
Australia’s national library offers Trove[2], which has a huge collection of Australian public domain newspapers.
Most of their repository is likely funded by your tax dollars and is there for the public to use.
[1]: https://www.neh.gov/divisions/preservation/national-digital-... [2]:https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/
[1]: https://ajxs.me/blog/The_Identity_of_The_Sanctimonious_Kid.h...
[2]: https://mhnsw.au/collections/state-archives-collection/