“show me a voroni map mapping out Regional Newspaper Empires — Every place assigned to the nearest major surviving daily newspaper. Could size by circulation. Show me how this changed over the years as news papers appeared and disappeared”
368 web-extracted records covering 146 major current and historical U.S. dailies, sampled at 18 snapshot years from 1870 to 2025. Every point in the contiguous United States is assigned to its geometrically nearest paper alive at that year — a Voronoi “empire”, not actual readership, delivery, ownership, or reporting coverage. This is an exploratory prototype, not a census of all newspapers: early frames show known title lifespans, and the 2025 frame is by far the most complete view.
Circulation is a latest or source-specific observation (print, Sunday, digital or combined, on differing definitions) — it is not a historical time series, so the same marker size appears in every year a title is alive and sizes are indicative rather than strictly comparable. Two papers fall outside the contiguous-U.S. frame and are not drawn: the Honolulu Star-Advertiser (Honolulu, HI) and El Nuevo Día (Guaynabo, PR); both remain in the table.
| Newspaper | City | St | Founded | Ceased | Status | Circulation | Vintage | Source |
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Method: 368 web-extracted rows (one per sampled newspaper and snapshot year) deduplicating to 146 titles across 18 snapshot years, 1870–2025; drawn from public newspaper lists (refdesk.com, Wikipedia, grokipedia.com, wiki.harro.com). A Voronoi cell is nearest straight-line territory in map projection, not readership or delivery. Circulation is the latest or source-specific observation with its vintage year where given; missing values are drawn as neutral dashed rings and no totals are computed. Seeds are geolocated by home city and state; Honolulu, HI and Guaynabo, PR fall outside the contiguous-U.S. frame and were cut from the map for space. Exploratory prototype; not a census of U.S. dailies.