People love collecting things. From stamps, to bottle caps, to Big Gulp cups. Pogs anyone?
If there is more than one of anything, people will want to collect it. So in this light, collecting newspapers is as normal as the kid looking for the Carl Yazstremski baseball card with the big sideburns!
The cool thing about newspaper collecting isn't the paper cuts or doing American crossword puzzles from 1770: "An 8 letter word for 'the oppressive standing Army'" Hmmmm.
It's the ability to own a small piece of history, live the moment as it were, and see how people were presented with the big news of the day.
People collect newspapers for a variety of reasons. What was news reporting like out out in the Wild Wild West, compared to The Times in London during the Industrial Revolution? Or how about Germany in 1937? Obviously there are the big events through out history, like the Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy assassinations, the Titanic, the Ok Corral, Bonnie and Clyde, VE-Day 1945, the list goes on forever.
Ebay has loads of papers for sale if you are so inclined, for reasonably low prices. The good thing about newspapers is that lots of them are printed which keeps prices down. Of course price varies depending on the rarity, the newspaper (is it the New York Times, or the Marxist Newsletter from MIT?), and of course its physical condition.