An Inside Look: Expanding Spatial Journalism in the Bay Area
By Amy Schmitz Weiss, Ph.D., Journalism Professor at San Diego State University
News organizations these days are constantly seeking ways to understand how they can better serve their communities. Some are approaching this by hosting community news events, investing in new subjects to cover, and identifying new technologies to help connect news and the community.
Well, there’s another effort that has been underway.
A group of newsrooms in California embarked on such an experience in 2021. Through a Google News Initiative grant awarded to Bloom Labs, a local news technology company, the project aimed to bring together seven California newsrooms for a year on a collaborative project that looked at the power of location, news, and collaboration with location-based technology. Called the Bay Area News Collective, the newsrooms included East Bay Times, The Mercury News, KQED, Local News Matters, San Jose Spotlight, Marin Independent Journal, and Bay City News.
Each newsroom worked with Bloom’s location technology to geotag their news stories over a year (from December 2020 to October 2021). Over 8,200 stories were geotagged from this project from 486 neighborhoods in the Bay Area region. The project allowed each newsroom to see the news geotagged by category, geographic location, and timeframe — and see this geographic data for their own news organization as well as the other newsrooms in the collective.
When the grant came to an end, many of the newsrooms continued on with Bloom, including The Mercury News and Local News Matters. These two newsrooms in particular noticed there were more opportunities and insights to gain by continuing to geotag news.
Geotagging news, a new experience for readers
Randall Keith, managing editor overseeing digital content and audience development for the Bay Area News Group, said they have noticed various benefits to geotagging the news stories on The Mercury News website.
For example, they have a Bloom map automatically appear below news articles on The Mercury News website so the reader can see the location of where the story has happened. Here’s an example.
“Having the maps on the bottom of stories has been a helpful thing for readers,” Keith said.
During the Bay Area News project, many of the newsrooms realized that geotagging content brought up a lot of location-specific questions about what should be tagged or not.
For example, a story that was focused on what happened at a specific address was easier to geotag than a regional story that wasn’t focused on a specific location or series of locations. As a result, not all articles were geotagged by reporters and editors.
Keith says that geotagging news stories about restaurants are one clear indicator of their service to their readers:
“So, for example, when writing about a restaurant, it’s very natural to include in the story the answer to the question, ‘where is that restaurant?’ That’s a very helpful thing for readers. And I think the map just gives you a visual representation of that. For some readers, that is going to be more helpful when they look and say ‘Oh it’s in that part of San Jose,’ versus trying to look at the text of a street address and then think, ‘where is that street?’ or clicking through to find a map on the restaurant website to see where it is.”
The Mercury News also has an interactive news near me map from Bloom on their site so viewers can explore news items happening in the region.
Mercury News readers can also sign up for a newsletter to get news that happens near them based on the news items they see on the map. Keith said they are getting traffic from the map and are seeing people signing up for the news near me newsletter.
Looking within, identifying new opportunities
Other newsrooms in the project were able to see how the geotagging process helped their operations internally. For example, Local News Matters noticed how much geotagged content allowed them to gain unique insights:
“This project was helpful to see where our stories were on the map, literally, so that we could get a visual representation of the communities and the types of stories that we were doing most often. To see our work aggregated and have that kind of filter where we could slide it over time or over different geographic areas and overlay it with the stories of all the participants in the project helped reinforce or challenge our assumptions about what we were doing,” said Katherine Rowlands, publisher of Bay City News Service and Local News Matters.
In reviewing the map and seeing the aggregated geotagged data, Rowlands said it allowed them to think of several questions:
“But it’s not until you actually are confronted with the map that you would think about that next step, like what are we not covering, what should we be covering, and how do we figure out what to cover,” Rowlands said.
Now, seven months into 2022, Rowlands and her team continue to geotag their Local News Matters content for 12 counties in the greater Bay Area. She has been able to make decisions about their news coverage as it relates to location.
They prominently display the map on their website home page and newsletters and are deploying a location-specific section of their site related to Stockton and San Joaquin County, which will have a map for that area on their site:
“We’re starting to deploy our Report for America staffers in Stockton and San Joaquin County. We anticipate that in the year ahead we’re going to have quite a bit of coverage around that location. We will have on our Local News Matters site a menu option for Stockton and San Joaquin County and if you click on that you should be able to find a collection point for stories and interesting visuals….and we can also make a Stockton-centric view of the map, so that readers who are looking specifically for information about that area can see it. They will be able to click on the map and roam around it, but also zoom out to see how coverage plays in the context of the greater region,” Rowlands said.
Rowlands said the map has helped her to identify staffing opportunities where news coverage was lacking:
“Personally, I really like looking at the map and the data, because I am making decisions about resource deployment and hiring when I think about what we’re covering in the Bay area. Six or eight months ago I specifically hired somebody who was located in Vallejo in part because we had a lack of coverage in the North Bay. There’s a lot of newsy things that I know are happening there, and you can see that on the map now,” Rowlands said.
She is also using the map as a learning tool to help her interns learn about their organization as well as helping the reporters use the map to learn more about the communities they are covering.
The Bay Area News Collective allowed the seven newsrooms to see the Bay Area region in a different context and it showed the newsrooms how location can be definite as well as nuanced when it comes to understanding its role in the news. Certainly, this project resulted in many new questions that will need to be explored further.
There’s also the layer of spatial analytics that comes along with this geotagging process. This represents an understudied area. Newsrooms can benefit from having a different understanding of their news coverage and the communities they interact with when they have the opportunity to analyze geographic data along with other layers of information in a spatial analytics framework.
It’s only through continued experimentation can spatial news experiences be understood and enhanced.
Rowlands hopes there is another opportunity to engage in another collaboration of this sort in the future, “We benefited from the information and really liked working together, and if there were a way to continue it with another grant or collaborative effort, we’d be happy to participate.”
The overall project’s results and findings can be found in the report here.
Amy Schmitz Weiss, Ph.D., Journalism Professor at San Diego State University. Follow her on Twitter: @digitalamysw or reach out to her by email: aschmitz@sdsu.edu
Amy is a former journalist who has been involved in new media for more than a decade. She has worked in business development, marketing analysis, and account management for several Chicago Internet media firms. Her research interests include spatial journalism, online journalism, media sociology, news production, multimedia journalism, and international communication. She teaches journalism courses in basic writing and editing, multimedia, web design, data journalism, mobile journalism, sensor journalism, media entrepreneurship, and spatial journalism.
Bay Area News Collective was a collaborative newsroom project that took place in 2021 and focused on using geographic tools, data, and research methods to understand and act on the needs of local news representation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Newsroom partners included The Mercury News, East Bay Times, Marin Independent Journal, San Jose Spotlight, Bay City News, Local News Matters, and KQED.
