Years ago I did an exploratory UX spike, an attempt to make history more tangible, by giving each day a dot (so a couple of centuries fit on a screen), with the dots providing, among other things, scans of that day's newspapers and magazines. Nice for browsing/surfing history. Part of not pursuing it further, was newspapers - and historically there were many many more newspapers per region, let alone per person - newspapers were already mostly paywalled, and becoming less available with time. Even libraries which did their own scanning of archived local papers, would grow tired of support, and turn them over for paywalling. My understanding was there was little money in it, but all it takes is enough to scatter moats everywhere, to make a terrain inaccessible to broad access.