Are there archives of old newspapers?

I’ve been wondering what writing looked like pre-ai. It feels like everything reads like ai now. Even substack a community that is theoretically full of writings also reads like ai. Then I started thinking maybe that was my own personal bias? Maybe I wanted everything to read like ai and so it did? I was sooooooo deeply embedded into using chatgpt that I noticed I stopped being able to do things that used to be super easy for me. That was a quick one way ticket to never using it ever again for me. And to convince myself further I deep dived into how bad it is for the planet. I always knew it wasn’t great, but was justifying my own use of it believing I wasn’t using it “that much” or it was only for really hard things. But that was a lie I was telling myself to make myself feel okay with what I was doing.

Anyway, now I feel like I’m very familiar with how ChatGpt sounds. And I feel like I see it everywhere. So I started looking to see – are there archives of old newspapers? Like from 2010 and earlier? Obviously language evolves, but not that much right? And I read a lot of novels, but novels aren’t written the same way that say a personal blog or human interest piece or opinion column are written. As it turns out the answer is not only yes, but yes abundantly. Yes incredibly easy to find. The website is quite literally newspaperarchives.com. The library has thousands of digital archives. You can find old magazines on FB Marketplace. It turns out we’ve been writing and saving writing for way longer than I realized, and access to it is immediate.

I’ll check back in with some of my favorite stories, but for now I’m excited to dive in!