News cartography and epistemic authority in the era of big data: Journalists as map-makers,map-users,and map-subjects

Abstract

Although the destabilization of journalism’s epistemic authority has been widely discussed, one critical element has been underexplored—the role of place. For journalists, claiming provenance over “where” has enabled control over a domain of knowledge, and one key means for doing so has been through news cartography, now rendered digitally. However, digital news cartography (digital news maps) exposes journalists’ epistemic authority to new challenges, from reliance on big data collected by others to maps about journalism itself that show journalists’ diminished authority over place. The case of digital news maps offers a chance to interrogate how journalists know what they know and how they know it and, more broadly, begs the question of how place and mapping must be considered in new media research.

Keywords

Analytics big data cartography data journalism digital maps epistemology news cartographalytics news cartography news epistemology

One of the least investigated areas of journalistic professional control is the domain over “where.” Power is invoked by the act of place-making, which creates borders—physical or imagined—and requires choices about inclusion and exclusion (Anderson, 2006; Massey, 1993). In 1986, Hallin argued that “where,” as one of the six basic questions of journalism, has been taken for granted rather than interrogated. Given that place-based critiques have increasingly become part of the attack on trust in media, particularly in the United States and also in Europe (Kendzior, 2018; Stiglitz, 2017), there is renewed rationale now, three decades later, to revisit the “where” in journalism. To begin probing questions about the “where” in journalism, this article uses the case of digital news cartography (or digital news maps) to interrogate journalistic epistemology and journalists’ claims to epistemic authority.

One way for journalists to claim epistemic authority or “the legitimate power to define, describe, and explain bounded domains of reality” (Gieryn, 1999: 1) has been by “being there” and being able to communicate what “being there” meant for news consumers in ways other social actors could not. Historically, journalists retained this role by exercising power over the platforms people used to access news and by taking advantage of their material resources, professional practices, and routines to establish their “legitimate knowledge … for a trustable reality” (Gieryn, 1999: 1). While questions about how journalists create and reflect place have received attention, particularly among global communication scholars (Thussu, 2006), how those places are represented by maps, and now digital maps, has received less attention. In light of the big data and platform era, digital news maps offer a key case to think about journalistic epistemology, or how journalists know what they know, as well as journalists’ epistemic authority, or how their knowledge claims are articulated and justified (Ekström, 2002).

Journalists have mapped the news for decades, if not for centuries, and news maps are often the primary way the public encounters cartography (Monmonier, 1989). Today, journalists make maps in an environment of ASAP journalism (Usher, 2014), using troves of big (or biggish) data. This “high-speed cartography,” as Tim Wallace, cartographer at The New York Times, explained to Wired, is “like a BitTorrent of graphic making. We all take our little bit and cram through it as fast as we can” (Miller, 2014). Digital news cartography is also key to immersive longform storytelling and interactive projects; maps are visual representations of complicated databases turned into geographically distributed, clickable, and even on-demand, customizable, knowledge (Anderson, 2018; Fink and Anderson, 2015; Lewis and Usher, 2013; Usher, 2016).

Thus far, scholarship has primarily focused on the rise of data journalism (Appelgren, 2018; Parasie, 2015; Usher, 2016), with digital news maps getting an ancillary look. However, these digital news maps, often thought of as the provenance of data journalists,¹ not only create epistemological tensions within journalism practice but also about journalism itself. The larger research question at hand asks how journalists’ claims of epistemic authority over the creation of public knowledge are both enhanced and undermined via the case of digital news maps. With this in mind, this article considers how digital news maps provoke an epistemological contestation of place in journalism through a three-part framework: journalists as map-makers, journalists as map-users, and journalists as map-subjects.

As map-makers, journalists make claims for control and order through their authoritative version of events or data-based conclusions. As map-users, journalists use maps (made by others) for news decision-making, from production to distribution. As map-subjects, journalists and journalism are mapped, revealing both the contingent and elite nature of journalism, from the retrenchment of news outlets to the clustering of media jobs on coasts and in large cities. The article explores these questions through this framework, beginning with a discussion of the relationship between place, knowledge, and journalism and the role of maps in journalists’ epistemic authority. The article is not intended as an empirical contribution, but rather as a framework through which to problematize competing knowledge claims in the case of digital news cartography, although primary and secondary data analyses help bolster the argument. Although much of the analysis is of Western journalism, the foundation for the argument is global in both origin and scope. As such, the article hopes to prompt further academic engagement with digital news maps and news cartography, particularly on a comparative scale.

Place, knowledge, and journalism

Place is seldom invoked as a site of professional contestation for journalists but instead is presumptive as evidence of control; for example, research on foreign correspondents and transnational journalism shows that defining place is fraught with power dynamics that reveal tensions of capitalism, colonialism, and appropriation, with journalists in control of the narrative (Hannerz, 2004). Other place and spatial themes also emerge in research that show how news production is influenced by these factors, for example, the bureaucratic organization of beats (Fishman, 1988; Tuchman, 1978), remaking office space (Robinson, 2011; Usher, 2015), and locative journalism (Nyre et al., 2012). A new call for spatial journalism has emerged, with the intention of connecting geographic space and place-based knowledge (Schmitz Weiss, 2015). But from the specific perspective of news cartography, there has been little update since the late 1980s (Monmonier, 1989), although there have been reflections on lack of progress in innovation in data journalism, including digital maps (Loosen et al., 2017).

Defining “place” is a subject of fierce academic debate; thus, the theoretical connection between place and knowledge is abbreviated here. To wit, places are spaces we endow with meaning; Lefebvre notes that we categorize, classify, and name spaces, and in turn make them places (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith, 1991). As such, place is a site of epistemic knowledge generation, where one not only gathers knowledge about the world but also constructs this knowledge into meaning (Entrikin, 1991). In fact, Heidegger (1971) links our human capacity to be emplaced as the central essence not just of knowledge but also being; moreover, having a shared sense of place is also critically important to social cohesion. Place is not only relational, at once empirically grounded and constructed, but also reflects the negotiation among distinct legitimizing forces that range from an individual’s material experience to meso- and macro-level institutions and actors (Tuan, 1977). Journalistic authority has been theorized to come from a similar relational notion of legitimacy (Carlson, 2017); the emplacement of journalists as proximate to news has functioned to embolden these claims (Zelizer, 1990).

Journalists engage in an empirical project that relies on observation, measurement, evidence, and experience (Hanitzsch, 2007), a journalistic epistemology founded on “rules, routines and institutionalized procedures” that structure “the form of the knowledge produced and the knowledge claims expressed (or implied)” (Ekström, 2002: 260). Absolute trust in journalism is not required for journalists to provide this knowledge (nor desirable), but some basic need to trust journalistic epistemology, or how journalists came to know, is what has enabled news to be authoritative, even if the news itself is imperfect. Lewis and Westlund (2015) describe the epistemological project of journalism as the “legitimation of new claims about knowledge and truth” (p. 448).

Journalists’ domain over place is critical to their claims of epistemic authority. As Hallin (1986) contends,

Journalists not only tell us where a particular event took place, they also … tell us where we are in a more general and much more important sense … They communicate to us images of our neighborhoods and cities, of the nation and the world around it, and even of the universe. (p. 110)

Journalists, for most of the past two to three hundred or so years, have often been best positioned as place-knowers, often at the expense of the people actually in them (Thussu, 2006). In part, this is because journalists play an essential role in providing the public accounting of reality: because we cannot know or experience all things in the world through our own terms, if we wish to know about what we cannot see, we must trust someone else to provide that accounting of reality for us. Cartography has often been the visual depiction of what this great beyond looks like (Friendly et al., 2008).

Journalists are then our emplaced agents and, thus, help reduce social complexity, or as Luhmann (2017) explains,

The individual, can therefore make sense of [the world] only if it is presented to him in an already reduced, simplified, prearranged form. In other words, he has to be able to depend on and rely on the external processing of information … he might distrust the newspapers but still assumes that their news is at least news …

Journalists have been in the place-observing, place-making business for a long time, which established authority over those who weren’t emplaced—a domain of expertise founded in “being there” as well as “telling there,” or a systemized process of epistemic understanding and knowledge production that then set them apart as professional knowers. But as Carlson (2017) points out, “distant presence is not enough to assure authority” (p. 14): just because news happens outside of people’s immediate realm of observation does not mean that people will then listen—or that journalists are automatically granted the power to chronicle these events. Nonetheless, journalists’ place-based epistemic authority has been powerful; it allows journalists to articulate and reinforce hegemonic representations of places (Matei et al., 2001; Parisi, 1998). Moreover, journalistic place-making is not just about cultural imaginaries, but can also have effects on people’s material existence; Shumow and Gutsche (2016) find that metropolitan newspapers play a significant role in “geographic policy making.”

However, journalists’ place-making authority has been challenged for a number of reasons. Journalists no longer have the sole power to broadcast the far-away for the rest of us, thanks to mobile and digital technology (Thurman, 2008). There are no longer journalists in many of the places they used to be, from locations of bureaus (Hannerz, 2004) to shut-down news buildings and news organizations (Carlson, 2012; Usher, 2015). More recent discussions about declines in trust reflect that journalists, especially political journalists in the United States, have failed to show their place-based knowledge as significantly more authoritative than other social actors, including local populations (Shafer and Doherty, 2017). As such, journalists’ epistemic authority through the place-based construction of knowledge has significant consequences, and when it is perceived as faulty, it may well damage journalists’ ability to claim their role as authorized place-knowers.

Nonetheless, new modalities of journalism, like digital mapping, provide an opportunity to rethink, as Matheson (2004) argues, “what is conventional and normal in the everyday practices of journalism,” and moreover allows “rearticulation in this institutional product of the relation between journalists and users, of the claim to authority made in the news text and of the news text as product” (p. 443). In the era of big data and platforms, questions about digital news maps and the renegotiation of journalists’ place-based authority provide new insights into the epistemic challenges for journalists as map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects. Thus, the next section addresses how maps, and in particular digital maps, afford a particularly useful case for this inquiry.

News cartography and knowledge

Cartography, like journalism, is an exercise in the reduction of complexity and requires making choices about what matters and who counts; in particular, news cartography embodies a tension between purporting to represent some sort of objective reality and being unable, in the epistemological sense, to truly be able to do so. As Daley (1999) notes, “When news maps are added to the naive realism of news discourses, there is a double gloss on the glass metaphors” (p. 266). Significantly, while maps relay spatial stories, maps can also be thought of as encompassing “imaginary cosmographies, landscape paintings, and ‘mental maps’ that guide a multiplicity of forms and actors engaged in knowledge production” (Edson, 2001: 1899). This can have significant consequences for public knowledge; news maps can compress both time and geographic distance, but this effort at reducing information complexity can mask political ideologies, simplify arguments, and silence those not represented (Harley, 1988; Monmonier, 2014; Vujaković, 2014). To critically investigate the role of maps in news knowledge, digital news cartography should also be understood to be not just maps made of journalists but also maps used by journalists for newswork and maps made about them, or as ways of mapping that enable idea generation, links, and associations.

Although most of the scholarship on mapping in journalism has to do with the maps made by journalists and less about journalists as map-users or map-subjects, research on journalists as map-makers reveals a powerful link between journalistic cartography and epistemology. As journalism professionalized in the 1920s, journalists strengthened their epistemological claims via information visualization to provide a more defensible version of “the truth” (Anderson, 2018). Monmonier’s (1989) Maps with the News provides an extensive historical overview of news cartography, noting it has been a principal means for people to understand distant locales and the scope of ongoing events. Moreover, as Vujaković (1999) observes, cartographic news may well provide a new discursive opportunity, for example, the post–Cold War European landscape. News mapping can serve as a symbolic battleground for different stakeholders, as Daley (1999) shows via research on news cartography after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and as Cromley (2017) documents through a study of The New York Times’ maps of the French Indo-China War that articulate a Western narrative of dominance.

Digital news maps add greater complexity to the epistemological tensions presented by analog news cartography. Today’s digital maps take advantage of advances in GIS software, a vision first imagined in the early 1990s (Herzog, 2003). Although in 2008 researchers Holmberg and Foote (2008) found little integration of digital interactives across seven US newspapers, they recognized their potential, noting “recent advances in interactive, multimedia, and web-based cartography offer new possibilities for integrating maps with news stories” (p. 342). Since then, what can be known and what is known have expanded, and digital mapping has become an obvious form for journalists to unleash their new computational capacities, although they are more likely to work with biggish data (thousands of rows of campaign finance data) than the brontobytes of big data held by platform companies. Digital news maps, often augmented by interactivity, offer new ways to construct knowledge via information exploration; users can query maps’ underlying databases in customized and personalized ways and then add or subtract layers of information to highlight specific areas of interest (Lindgren and Wong, 2012). Studies suggest digital maps are one of the most common forms of data journalism (Loosen et al., 2017). Yet the way that these digital news maps enable knowledge production merits additional critique, as detailed below, because of the epistemic claims embedded when journalists are map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects.

Journalists as map-makers

From the outset, journalistic map-making raises questions about journalists’ epistemic authority. Digital mapping has enabled journalists to stake a claim to epistemic authority by making data seemingly knowable and understandable. Journalists generally rely on data provided by others for their mapping efforts, and like big data, the data used by journalists are also contingent on the social practices of its collection and construction (Boyd and Crawford, 2012) and require new skills such as advanced computational knowledge and statistics (Keim et al., 2013). Thus, journalists are at the epistemological debt of these data providers, legitimating these other social actors as other authoritative knowledge providers. In addition, journalists must be wary of assumptions contained in the data, which make them vulnerable to epistemic challenges about how they know and what they know.

Election mapping deserves particular attention as it illustrates the challenges journalists face when they have asserted a claim to epistemic authority while using big data gathered by others. In the wake of the Brexit and Trump elections, these maps (and data journalism more generally) have been equated with political prediction (Lewis and Waters, 2018). In the United States, newsrooms incentivize election maps by both innovation and economic rationales. Interactive journalists can plan on regular elections and use them as ways to try out new digital projects and draw attention to their value within the newsroom (Usher, 2018a). Election maps also can generate tremendous returns on web traffic (on the US election day in 2016, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight spiked to a record 16.5 million unique users; Putterman, 2016).

Election predictions are meant to be just that—predictions. However, digital maps afforded cognitive shortcuts that led news consumers to have a sense of certainty, meaning that misses like Silver’s “Nowcast,” which predicted Hillary Clinton had a 71% chance of winning the US presidential election, are detrimental to the public’s trust in journalists and, in turn, their epistemic authority (Usher, 2016). As Hanna and Farnsworth (2013) explained about 2012 election maps, journalists tend to fall back on “simple choropleth maps,” or maps that use red or blue to show winners or losers by party, which “do[es] not allow analysts or the general public to see how close an election was in any particular state” (p. 3), not to mention silencing any third-party candidates.

On the other hand, interactive maps may enable journalists to demonstrate their epistemic authority, showing connections that cannot be revealed by news narrative alone or by visualizing complicated data most people would otherwise have difficulty understanding. These maps underscore that journalists have skills and computational knowledge to map at a scale, speed, and depth most news consumers could never fathom. As Young and Hermida (2015) observe in their study of The LA Times’ Homicide Report, “interactive maps allow newsrooms to incorporate the interactive capabilities of the web in the visual presentation of data” (p. 390). In the case of the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers, cross-national collaborative investigative efforts and digital news mapping enabled journalists to show interconnections across a vast web of data, countries, institutions, and people in new ways. However, knowing how the data are gathered requires considerable care, as the presentation and visualization of data may enable cognitive shortcuts and false assumptions. Thus, as map-makers, journalists are both challenged and enabled to show their domain over place-based knowledge.

Journalists as map-users

Journalists also use maps made by others for place-based comprehension to orient news production. There are two key ways journalists become map-users: first, when they use maps that provide data that are exceedingly difficult for journalists to produce (e.g. crime maps, activist maps, or crowd maps), and second, when journalists use maps for commercial imperatives, particularly to generate newsroom analytic insights (referred to here as news “cartographalytics”). While these maps are not made by journalists, these maps should also be thought of as news cartography; they are critical sources that aid journalists in epistemic knowledge generation, or another way of how journalists come to know.

Maps produced by other social actors

At the very outset, journalists often use baseline maps to begin their own efforts, which are often provided by large tech companies such as Google, Apple, or the leading GIS software company, Esri. Thus, the cartographic foundations of so many digital news maps should prompt alarm and inquiry, given the implicit socio-technical and political assumptions (Bittner et al., 2013) and the further extension of platform companies on news knowledge (Napoli and Caplan, 2017). Journalists also use maps made by other social actors, such as civic, commercial, activist, and crowd maps, to orient their news gathering and subsequent mapping efforts; these maps form part of journalists’ epistemic routines. In fact, digital maps are now an integral way that public institutions and private industries manage their own data and present it to the public; maps from real-time traffic to real estate home sales suggest the importance of further inquiry into digital mapping’s epistemic role beyond application to journalism.

Digital maps play a powerful role: Wallace (2009) argues police crime-mapping software, which maps crime through empirical and algorithmic insights, enables police to assert a hegemonic vision of criminality. Journalists rely on these maps; for example, CompStat, a pioneering digital crime-mapping effort first introduced in New York City, provided journalists with news leads that led to them either demonizing or valorizing particular neighborhoods as “safe” in the public imagination. Recent critiques of algorithmic policing have called on journalists to reassert their epistemic authority by deconstructing how these police data are used to predict and control, including the data and visualizations created (Diakopoulos, 2015).

Maps made by others have implicit agendas that can alter how journalists then cover (and map for themselves) public issues. Maps made by activists that were then incorporated into news coverage have been shown to help alter the terms of debate for public flashpoints. A pre-digital example reveals that activists’ maps of acid rain were an essential means for environmentalists to insert the issue into news coverage; the data were not easily found by journalists, nor was there initially a news imperative to collect them (McNeil and Culcasi, 2015). In another case, Leuenberger (2012) details how Al Jazeera English online relied on maps produced by an Israeli human rights organization for coverage of Palestinian refugee camps; the news organization went as far as providing an external link to the group’s PDF. These are examples of mapping efforts using data that are unlikely to be gathered or necessarily available to journalists to map on their own.

In addition, new capacities for collective intelligence and real-time digital mapping through “people’s cartography” (Crampton and Krygier, 2005) build on thousands of individually sourced reports, mapping efforts that journalists can rarely initiate or sustain but nonetheless use for shaping news coverage. For example, Open Street Map, a collaborative, open-source digital mapping effort, often provides the only cartographic representation in areas of limited statehood, giving citizens a chance to direct public attention (Kovačič and Lundine, 2013). Crowd-sourced crisis mapping can often provide real-time cartography that aids rescue workers, election monitors, and journalists (Bailard, 2014); the maps then become geographic interventions into news decision-making. While some argue that this “people-powered cartography” is less transformative than we might hope (Hacklay, 2013), new types of social actors nonetheless are making maps that did not exist before. When journalists are map-users, maps made by others function as news cartography and can play an important role in news decision-making.

Journalists as map-users for digital news strategy

Journalists also use digital maps as news cartography in another way: to maximize web traffic and, thus, digital revenue. Digital analytics companies from Google to Omniture to Chartbeat enable journalistic surveillance over news consumption patterns, with research showing the pernicious effects of analytics on content creation (Petre, 2015; Tandoc, 2014), although these “cartographalytics” have received little attention and may be the closest journalists get to working with big data. In this case, an epistemic contest over who controls knowledge production emerges and how that control is exacted, on one side, by the advertisers, audiences, and analytics companies and, on the other side, by editorial priorities.

These news cartographalytics might be considered empowering for journalists, who can now use geolocative patterns to better know their audiences and therefore better tailor their news coverage. During a field visit to the USA Today headquarters in the Washington, DC area (19 January 2018), the author observed the operation of the “Network National News Desk,” tasked with taking local stories from Gannett’s 109 US newspapers and repurposing them for wider distribution on the main USA Today digital properties. The editor of the Network National News Desk relies on a real-time map of the United States with points marking all of Gannett’s newspaper properties showing analytics. Color-coded drop pin icons are used to indicate how “hot” a newspaper’s web traffic is relative to its average web traffic. If the traffic is “popping” at any of these properties (green), the editor can then drill down to the local newspaper’s website to find the cause of the spike. These stories, once identified, are edited for clarity for a wider US audience by adding in information to aid those without local knowledge and to improve headlines’ search optimization. This monitoring of news cartographalytics reveals how they influence newswork and ultimately what and how that news reaches the public.

But this cartographic surveillance is also tinged with corporate incentives that compete against journalists’ authority to select and craft coverage that meets editorial priorities, as seen in the author’s fieldwork at large metropolitan newspapers. Due to the vagaries of digital news distribution via platforms, US metropolitan newspapers cannot predict what stories might take off nationally. This so-called “drive-by” traffic, when a reader consumes an article but may never return, is considered suboptimal by digital advertisers (Rosenwald, 2017). As observed in fieldwork, editors at The Fort Worth Star-Telegram expressed chagrin over having a story “Drudged” or linked to by The Drudge Report (Usher, 2018b): although the story was the top performing story in terms of web analytics for the year, the newsroom cannot plan to replicate this success, nor is it considered profitable to have non-local readers.

Fieldwork at The Miami Herald provided additional support for how news cartographalytics can alter news priorities.² The newspaper gets significant outside-Florida web traffic from Miami sports news, “Florida news” or oddball news, and longform investigative projects. However, the newspaper must use returning local audiences to make the case for its merits to digital advertisers, causing journalists to be frustrated about stories with low news value that nonetheless go viral (“Florida news”) as this traffic is not geographically proximate. On the other hand, journalists were also frustrated that even high-quality news stories conceived to draw national audiences still might not be considered valuable because of digital advertising imperatives.

Each of these three field-based examples underscores how journalists rely on interactive, big data–infused digital maps made by others for critical elements of journalistic workflow, from news production to strategic planning to news decision-making. Thus, these maps serve as digital news maps/digital news cartography although they themselves are not products of newswork: they inform and guide how news (and knowledge) gets created and distributed by journalists. As map-users, journalists illustrate their domination in the field of power by relying on maps made by others, such as activists and advertisers, for knowledge about news, showing their subjectivity and epistemic vulnerability.

Journalists as map-subjects

Increasingly, journalists and news organizations have become map-subjects, often out of efforts to document the challenges professional journalism faces in the platform era. Thanks to GIS, visualization, and big and biggish data, scholars, journalists, and media critics can now use data about the news industry to map not just trends but also to critique, either implicitly or explicitly, journalists’ domain over place-based knowledge. There are a number of epistemological questions that emerge when journalists become map-subjects: How might mapping show what journalists do not or cannot know, or do not know well? How might the new subjectivity of journalists and journalism as “the mapped” challenge power dynamics? And more generally, how might maps of journalists/journalism create new opportunities for journalistic critique? As yet another form of news cartography, maps about the news can provide further descriptive insight into journalists’ epistemic claims.

Maps of journalists as body counts

The new subjectivity of journalists becomes particularly evident in maps that detail where and how many journalists and news organizations are geographically located. These maps function essentially as “body counts,” illustrating the subjectivity of journalists rather than their authority, serving to document what journalists cannot know about places, as well as their actual corporeal disappearance from these places. To count someone or something as a body, devoid of human context, reflects what Foucault (1984) would call evidence of “biopower”: the ability to surveil, diagnose, and impose social norms and discourse that influence knowledge production. Notably, journalists have reduced the powerless, such as refugees, to the same sort of cartographic subjectivity (Adams, 2018).

Increasingly, journalists have been mapped as “casualties” of the contraction of the newspaper industry; one of the earliest digital mapping examples is the now-defunct PaperCuts blog (2008–2012), which attempted to document the layoffs of every US journalist (the blogger was herself a laid-off journalist). More recently, digital news mapping has been used to critique journalists’ ability to tell stories that represent “America.” One geographic view of journalists’ labor statistics shows clustering along the coasts, providing support to critics who argue journalists are coastal elites (Shafer and Doherty, 2017). Other mapping efforts detail “news deserts” or “media deserts” (Stites, 2011), places where there is no regular local news. These maps are both real and metaphorical deserts for news—where no news can be found (Ferrier et al., 2016). They not only reveal the absence of journalists and thus critique the disappearance of place-based knowledge, but also document how the lack of journalists contributes to a growing population of “unnewsed” (Benton, 2017). Other mapping efforts display news ownership patterns, offering an explicit critique that non-local owners such as hedge funds and large chains care more about bottom lines than providing journalists with resources to cover local communities (Abernathy, 2016a). Moreover, these maps show news organizations as subjects of corporate control, underscoring the lack of autonomy journalists now have in establishing what they can know about a place. These digital news maps of where journalists are (and are not) become place-based critiques that challenge whether journalists can still claim epistemic authority over places about which they have limited firsthand knowledge.

Mapping patterns of news content

Digital news mapping also enables a level of critique of journalistic knowledge not possible before through big data insights into the geographic distribution of news content. Scholars and others can use addresses and latitude and longitude data to map where stories are being covered and can then further distill coverage types and content through automated or manual content analysis. This geolocation analysis of news stories is a way to assess “where” the news took place or was covered from, revealing patterns that show what does and does not get covered, or “where” journalists designated as not newsworthy.

Gasher (2015) has mapped online news flows of top US newspapers and top Canadian newspapers, revealing that despite their now potentially global digital reach, the newspapers continue to focus on home states, Washington elites, and sites of conflict (in this case, the Iraq War), suggesting a provincialism in their ability to “know” beyond their coverage areas, despite claims of national and international news prowess. Howe (2009), via an automated content analysis of geodata, mapped locations taken from stories about a Phoenix metro daily and found that per-capita income was correlated with per-capita news coverage; the wealthy received the most coverage. Similarly, geospatial analysis of ethnic media in Toronto showed the critical role this media played in creating both a proximate “home” and a cultural “home” (Lindgren, 2011). Thus, mapping where news stories happen provides rich insights into journalistic choices as well as how communities may well construct their self-understanding. This also enables new forms of critique into journalistic epistemology; as Gasher (2007) observed, the geographies of news “affirm existence and significance,” and tracking the “where” of stories shows the extent to which journalists make some places and people known and leave others out (p. 301).

Journalists and news organizations, as the mapped rather than mappers themselves, are now the subject known about, and thus, their claim to be superior knowledge providers is partially delegitimized. Through news content mapping, the inequities in journalists’ epistemological process, whereby routines, rules, and ideologies come to guide their knowledge creation, can be visualized and critiqued. Thus, big data becomes a way to hold journalistic place-making accountable by providing a layer of transparency about the “where” in newsmaking that was previously unimaginable. Journalists and news organizations can thus be judged on how well they can demonstrate place-based knowledge. As such, knowledge is created about journalists rather than by journalists.

Conclusion

The case of digital news maps aims to raise critical questions that go beyond journalism studies and extend across the domain of new media research: How do we come to know about place in the big data/platform era? Who has the power to provide and structure narratives about place? Thus, this exploration into digital news maps is an entry point for thinking about who and how authorized knowers come to be (Knorr-Cetina, 1981) and highlights the importance of thinking about knowledge, as objectified, embodied, and in the domain of the producer, but nonetheless as contested and contingent (Stehr, 2001).

This article establishes how digital news maps are sites of epistemic contestation through which multiple social actors struggle for legitimacy and power over place-based knowledge. The bold claims and open-ended questions articulated are intended to spur greater inquiry by new media scholars into digital cartography and big data more generally, not just as it relates to journalism. More broadly, this case aims to make an argument for re-centering place as a critical starting point for research in new media. Writing from the United States and using largely US examples to document the importance of place in journalism may well be inspired by a sense of urgency coming out of the 2016 presidential election, which prominently displayed political and social division across geographical divides, particularly along rural and urban lines. And certainly, global communication scholars have for decades shown how place can be an enduring theoretical starting point, but place has perhaps been siloed more than it should be and deserves engagement across multiple fields and subjects of inquiry. Place matters: as illustrated briefly in the theoretical outline, place is key to how we know about the world—how we come to know and how we then come to substantiate our claims to knowledge.

The case of digital news maps provides a call for scholars to be concerned about place with greater urgency. Journalism, as an institution and professional practice, serves as a bellwether for the challenges facing other institutions and key social actors. The centrality of epistemology to this inquiry reflects the growing crisis writ large of expertise and in trust in social institutions (Nichols, 2017) and the post-fact and post-truth panic (Suiter, 2016). Journalistic epistemology can be framed as part of a larger set of questions facing knowledge-producers in society: How do we know? Who gets to know? Who can claim authoritative knowledge or the “right to be listened to”? And how and why should that knowledge then be trusted?

The framework used to analyze journalists as map-makers, as map-users, and as map-subjects presents an inducement to think about the way big data and cartography intersect across different areas of inquiry. For example, as alluded to here, how are technology companies, or platforms for that matter, also map-makers, map-users, and map-subjects, or more broadly, how might this cartographic framework prompt multi-level analysis from individuals to organizations to institutions? Moreover, the framework proposed also begs a reconsideration of how we think about digital maps and what they can tell us. In the case of news cartography, I suggest that the provenance of news maps does not belong just to the journalists making them; instead, digital news maps can be thought of more broadly as an illustration about how journalists come to know about news and how we might come to know about journalism, about the decisions and paths to news-making, as well as insight into the limits of what journalists can know. The isomorphism and divergence with the news industry might well provide additional insight into the epistemological struggles of the field.

Also woven throughout this case is an interrogation about the role that big data plays in journalists’ work. When it comes to digital news cartography, the article smudges the definition of big data a bit—journalists generally do not engage with the kind of big data computer scientists consider big data, although increasingly big data has become part of the political economy of digital journalism. However, it is perhaps depressing to acknowledge that the paltry numbers for news cartographalytics may not even be thought of as big data, particularly when it comes to local news. But for journalists and for journalism, digital news cartography requires dealing with what counts as big data for them, thus requiring new computational knowledge and a renegotiation of ethics, expertise, economics, and epistemology (Lewis and Westlund, 2015).

Digital news cartography is an accessible way to understand the role that big data plays in knowledge creation and dissemination. These news maps illustrate the epistemic contest over who and how claims to knowledge about place emerge, which is especially consequential if place is considered to hold the essence of our being (Heidegger, 1971). The larger and fuzzy god-terms of social inquiry—“epistemology,” “knowledge,” “authority,” “epistemic practice,” and “epistemic authority”—try to get at central questions about who holds power over knowledge and how that knowledge is justified. Digital news cartography becomes a lens through which to trace the uncertainty and struggle over who and how authorized knowers come to be legitimated.

Footnotes

Author’s Note

Nikki Usher is now affiliated with University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, USA.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Nikki Usher

Notes

Author biography

Nikki Usher, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). She is the author of two books, Making News at The New York Times (2014) and Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (2016).

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