2007 · top-100 list
25
regional seeds · mean rank 17.0 · 7 metros missing from the next map · refdesk.com
Every point of the contiguous United States assigned to its nearest major surviving daily newspaper, across four ranking snapshots — 2007, 2013, 2017 and 2022 — built from 90 seed rows. Territory is nearest-editorial-center distance, not audited delivery area; marker size is inverse circulation rank, not literal circulation. Honolulu sits in its own card so its remote coordinates do not distort the mainland; Alaska has no ranked seed in these snapshots.
The 2017 top-100 ranking floods the map with 9 new metros at once — and 7 of them (Austin, Woodland Park, Fort Worth, Columbus, Pittsburgh, West Palm Beach, San Antonio) are gone again by 2022, a one-snapshot empire built by a wider cutoff, not a newspaper boom. 247wallst.com
Moving from 2007's top-100 list to 2013's top-25 table erases seven 2007 territories in one step — San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, Sacramento, St. Louis, Indianapolis and Kansas City — handing the interior West and Midwest to Denver, Minneapolis and Chicago. refdesk.com
The mean rank of regional seeds tightens from 17.0 in 2007 to 13.7 in 2022: as national brands crowd the top of the charts, the regional papers that remain sit higher up them. visualcapitalist.com
2022's four entrants are an odd quartet — the Seattle Times, The Buffalo News, the returning St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Villages Daily Sun of a Florida retirement community — proof that a top-25 circulation cut now rewards loyal local readerships over metro size. visualcapitalist.com
| Snapshot | Change | Papers | Titles | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | absent from next map | 7 | Chronicle (San Francisco); News/Free Press; Oregonian; Bee; Post-Dispatch; Star (Indianapolis); Star (Kansas City) | refdesk.com |
| 2013 | new to the map | 2 | Honolulu Star-Advertiser; Las Vegas Review-Journal | web.archive.org |
| 2013 | absent from next map | 4 | Orange County Register; Cleveland Plain Dealer; San Diego Union-Tribune; Atlanta Journal-Constitution | web.archive.org |
| 2017 | new, and gone by 2022 | 7 | Austin American; The Record (Woodland Park, NJ); Fort Worth Star-Telegram; Columbus Dispatch; Tribune Review (Pittsburgh); The Palm Beach Post; San Antonio Express-News | 247wallst.com |
| 2017 | new, and stays | 2 | San Francisco Chronicle; Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | 247wallst.com |
| 2017 | continuing seeds absent from next map | 2 | Las Vegas Review-Journal; The Star-Ledger (Newark) | 247wallst.com |
| 2022 | new to the map | 4 | Seattle Times; The Buffalo News; Villages Daily Sun; St. Louis Post-Dispatch | visualcapitalist.com |
| Newspaper | Metro | Rank | Size proxy | Status on this map | Source |
|---|
Method: exploratory reconstruction of major-daily geography from four noncomparable live-web rankings — a 2007 top-100 circulation list, AAM's March 2013 top-25 daily average-circulation table, a 2017 published 100-largest-newspaper ranking, and a 2022 top-25 daily-circulation visualization. 90 rows, one per regional newspaper seed per snapshot; the size proxy is inverse circulation rank because row-level circulation definitions differ across sources. Voronoi cells model nearest editorial center by geographic distance, not circulation boundaries. National brands USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, plus nonlocal business and free sheets, are excluded because they define no single regional home territory; entry and exit mean entering or leaving these rankings, not founding or closure. Honolulu is shown in a card, not tessellated; Alaska has no ranked seed. Cell colours and hatching restate row flags only.