They managed to last damn near a thousand years. Pretty remarkable when you think about it.
“...Roman newspaper archive...”
Well, there WERE historians - Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder, even Julius Caesar...
Eyewitnesses to their history, albeit with a slanted viewpoint...
They had historians, and those historians had access to material that long ago went into the first on a cold night. The amount of construction done by the Roman Empire gets a little more stunning every year, in the case of Germany etc the discovery of a long term Roman presence in areas not previously allowed by the little too sure of themselves set.
Quibble -- the empire started with the conquest of Ostia, and ended at last with the Turks' conquest of Constantinople, 18 centuries.