Professor of cross media content at the School of Journalism and Communication at Hogeschool Utrecht, Dr Piet Bakker, has produced an interesting heatmap to illustrate the ‘significance’ of European newspapers.

Following the predictions of futurist Ross Dawson last week that newspapers in the UK will be “extinct” in their current form by 2019, Bakker writes on his Newspaper Innovation blog that rather than measuring the insignificance of newspapers over time he wanted to do the opposite, using circulation and population data.

His results, based on the number of newspapers per 100 inhabitants, places Luxembourg at the top overall, while Norway leads when it comes to paid newspapers only.

The only consistent data we have for almost every country in the world are total circulation and population. If we define newspaper significance as the number of copies per 100 (15+) inhabitants, we can compare countries, see how this changes over years and predict how it will develop.

The graph below (made with Google Docs and the heat-map gadget) show this “significance”, the darker the color, the more significant newspaper are.

Hatip: paidContent