The Speed of News

How long the news of eleven events took to reach American newspapers, and later news websites, in four eras between 1799 and 2023

Swipe sideways to see all ten events.

Each newspaper is placed at the first page in the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection whose text reports the event. Because a paper carries a date but not a time, its line ends in a soft stroke covering the whole day printed on it, and the half-way figures use the end of that day. In the web era, each line is a news website, placed at the time printed on its first article about the event or, where the page gives none, at the time GDELT, which reads news sites around the world, found the article, which can be hours later. Those sites are drawn fainter, and the half-way figures count only the sites whose pages give a time. Each web plume draws 600 of its sites, chosen at random.

The collection holds only the papers that libraries have digitized, and machine-read text misses words on faded pages, so some papers printed the news earlier than shown.