An Interdisciplinary Approach to Local News: Using GIS Tools to Map News Availability
While technology has been implicated in some of the challenges facing local news today, it can also be part of the solution. In an innovative article in The Future of Local News: Research and Reflections, Claus Rinner’s team at Ryerson University employ GIS mapping to understand what kind of news coverage is available in a given geographical area, and also to see where gaps in coverage may exist. With an interdisciplinary team of technologists, geographers, and journalism researchers, Rinner et. al. show how news items can be considered as spatial data points for the purposes of GIS mapping. This mapping approach then allows for both a visual and statistical understanding of emerging patterns in news availability.
While there have traditionally been many different approaches applied to understanding journalism culture, audiences, and content, the application of GIS to the field of journalism studies represents an emerging and important field of research that employs quantitative and algorithmic analysis in service of understanding the information needs of a community. This type of research is both innovative in its own right, and also highlights the need for additional interdisciplinary team-based inquiry, both in journalism studies, and in the study of culture more generally.
Technology is one threat to local news. Social media tends to prioritize the popular rather than the boring but important, and platforms like Google and Facebook have resulted in declining ad revenues for local news outlets. On the other hand, technology can provide new ways to understand news and to demonstrate the value it plays in the community. Perhaps in time, it may also provide new ways to share and engage with local news. But it may take interdisciplinary and diverse teams to help us realize this full potential.
