All the News thats fit to print in the Newspaper

Todays post is a little out of the normal scope of this blog, but.... I think you'll forgive me.  "DCE" from The Yog-Sothoth Forum has come up with a simply AMAZING tool and resource that I'm super excited about.

As he wrote on his blog

So … what’s a prop-maker to do when searching for newspapers from a specific region to serve as “representative examples” for a design?

Well … one solution is just to use guesswork … but a better method is to produce a geographical index of your own. Over the past week or so, this is exactly what I’ve created for all newspapers in the Google News Archive which contain at least one issue printed in the 1920s. Now, scanning by hand through 2000+ newspapers sounds like a lot of work … but some clever filtering cut the size of the problem down to something more tractable. In the end it really only took a few days to visually inspect a page from every newspaper likely to have a 1920s issue …

In the end, my trawl over the (current) Google News Archive found 319 newspapers which were included with at least one 1920s issue; these were printed in 193 different cities/towns. Most newspapers came from the US or Canada, but there were a handful of titles from Australia (Sydney and Melbourne) and the UK (London and Glasgow). Plotting out these newspapers on a custom Google Map produces a nice geographic index of places for which scanned twenties newspapers are available — the pic below gives a static shot of part of the map; click that image to go to the shared map.

CLICK THIS LINK TO SEE A PRETTY CROSS-REFERENCED MAP

Now, while for the most part, this is somewhat outside of the scope of the Orient Express, perhaps a player whos character is from New York wants to keep up on New York News, and papers from New York would be available on the Orient Express (even if they were a week or so out of date).  Or The Globe from London.  I'm sure a creative Keeper can make good use of this amazing resource.