Is anyone buying old newspapers and if you’re not – why? Maybe I’m late to the game here but we’ve seen a run on nostalgia and on all things from CDs to DVDs to Cassette Tapes to magazines (thanks in part to grading companies and SI Kids cards having an exploding market). 

Still, I have a theory on newspapers that I want to run by you. 

Grandpa Fickle used to collect newspapers from important events in his life - both personal and from an entertainment perspective. Why? Because there was no Internet. No cellphones. The only way to have an actual written documentation of that event you went to or that moment when the president you voted for was sworn in, was to read and hold onto the newspaper. And a lot of people did that. 

They collected newspapers in the way they didn’t collect baseball cards. Tell me: why are you busy working today? Oh, right, because your grandfather used his 1952 Mickey Mantle cards as a way to make dumb sounds on his bicycle. And why are those cards so valuable today? Because all (or most) of our grandparents did the same thing. Jerks. (Just kidding… but also kinda not kidding). 

So now we do things like put all our baseball cards in non-destructible slabs and use our newspapers to make dumb ASMR videos. If we take the collectors mentality, when 30 years from now we look back on Ohtani’s 50/50 season and take out our Ohtani collection we bought from Topps, and pull out card #12 from the collection, with a PSA pop count of 89,327… maybe we should have been making fewer ASMR videos with the Los Angeles Times cover story on his 50/50 season and holding onto the paper instead. 

What do you think? Anyone collecting newspapers here? And if so, how do you display/protect them? Does anybody grade newspapers?

https://www.onmantel.com/news/50%2F50-on-the-ohtani-collection-but-all-in-on-banchero-35f66d58-6a07-4155-b768-0ffbef11faf7

"Under the latest national-security law, which took effect last month [ed: March 2024], possession of “seditious publications” is a crime. A Hong Kong resident could go to prison for having a keepsake copy of Apple Daily at home."
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hong-kongs-forbidden-apple-daily-possession-of-old-newspaper-can-now-be-a-crime-a637dc26?st=mndxqa0odc8c626&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
These are last day (June 24, 2021) issue. I relieved a Hong Kong resident of the legal exposure by buying the last two they had before the authorities did it the hard way. Don't see HK being free again in our lifetimes, so wanted to have these for historical nature. One thing I've learned as a collector is history is one of the main drivers of a collection's long term value, so when history makes a move, I try to do the same.
I've got a few 9/11 NYC papers saved as well (that was much closer to home for me) but those are not rare in any way; just personal.
Anyone have any rare or cherished newspapers?