Per una geografia della stampa: distribuzione spaziale e rappresentazione cartografica della diffusione dei quotidiani cartacei Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica e La Stampa in Italia (2004-2019)

In recent years a new line of research defined as journalism studies is emerging within the academic debates, hitherto little approached by geographical research. Following the stimuli coming from French social geography, the paper deals with the analysis of the circulation on the national territory of hard copies of some of the major Italian generalist newspapers using a spatial approach. The certified data provided by ADS have been collected and systematized in a geodataset using a GIS software, in order to produce illustrative cartography and elaborate basic geostatistics calculations on the circulation of newspapers from 2004 to 2019; statistics on a provincial scale were compared and correlated with some territorial socio-economic indicators. The analysis highlights the differences in terms of circulating copies between the various provinces of the peninsula, as well as the new areas of prevalence and distribution arisen in recent years; in addition, the existence of a positive spatial correlation between the circulation of copies and factors such as GDP per capita and the presence of local editions is suggested. In conclusion, the quantitative approach allows to trace a framework of the current geographies of the press and demonstrated application as heuristic tool for the monitoring of the present and future trend of the phenomenon