covercompare

Fetches US newspaper front pages and displays them side-by-side for easy comparison.

Live at covercompare.io

Webapp

Browse today's front pages at covercompare.io. Select individual papers or use preset configs (New York, National, West Coast). Shareable URLs sync your selection via query params.

Discord delivery: subscribe with a Discord webhook URL to receive a daily combined front-page image each morning. Papers are fetched automatically and delivered around 7 AM ET.

Papers

20 papers across named configs. See papers.yaml for the full list.

Region	Papers
New York	NY Post, Newsday, NY Daily News
National	NY Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal
Northeast	Boston Globe, NJ Star-Ledger, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Southeast	Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Midwest	Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle
Mountain/West	Denver Post, LA Times, SF Chronicle, Seattle Times

Papers with multiple sources try them in order — first success wins. See papers.yaml and CLAUDE.md for adding more.

CLI Scripts

The original bot scripts still work independently.

Setup

pip install -r requirements.txt

Set COVERCOMPARE_DISCORD_WEBHOOK to a Discord webhook URL before running.

Usage

python post_today.py                           # default papers (newsday + nypost)
python post_today.py 2025-11-15                # specific date
python post_today.py --config new_york         # all 3 NY papers left-to-right
python post_today.py --papers nypost dailynews # explicit paper list

Named configs are defined in papers.yaml. The new_york config runs Daily News → Newsday → NY Post (left-to-right by political lean).

Generated images are saved to generated_images/YYYY-MM-DD-{label}.jpg.

Flashback

Re-posts a previously generated image from generated_images/:

python flashback.py 2023-04-01

File overview

File	Purpose
app.py	Flask webapp: viewer API + subscription endpoints
db.py	SQLite wrapper for subscriptions
prefetch.py	Cron script: warm image cache each morning
deliver.py	Cron script: deliver to all active subscriptions
post_today.py	CLI entry point: fetch, combine, post
papers.yaml	Paper definitions and named run configs
fetch.py	Downloads cover images from paper sources
combine.py	Tiles N images side-by-side with optional whitespace trimming
discord.py	Posts image to Discord via webhook
flashback.py	Re-posts a historical combined image

See DEPLOY.md for server setup. Report issues on GitHub.

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You CAN judge a newspaper by its cover.