America's Newspaper History Gets Mapped

The Internet is killing newspaper reporting. That's the consensus understanding among many media watchers at least. But what a new interactive map from a group of Stanford University researchers shows is that the number of newspapers in the U.S. had been on the decline for decades.

Using a publications listing from the Library of Congress, the researchers plotted the number of newspapers in each American city since 1690, when Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick published its first (and only) issue. Users can scroll through the years to track journalism's geographic progression from the East Coast through the Midwest until finally reaching the Pacific. The more interesting take-away from the data, though, is how the number of publications has been declining for most of the 20th century.