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News from the Future of Public Media
Mapping Global News: The end of “foreign” bureaus?
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Jun 12, 2008 at 7:22 PM
One of the signature roles that public media projects can play is to compensate for cuts in international news coverage by commercial journalism outlets. As noted on the Beyond Broadcast site, PRI President and CEO Aliza Miller uses maps to effectively demonstrate the paucity of global coverage in TV news:
Distortions in coverage aren’t limited to the U.S., however. Check out these comparative coverage maps, a joint project of the Online Journalism Blog and L’Observatoire des Medias:
So, how can readers interested in a more balanced picture of global events overcome such limitations? One answer is to pull together streams of content from a variety of global sources, and let readers slice and dice what they see based on their own location and interests. That’s what the News Map project does, offering a “treemap” visualization of content filtered through the Google News aggregator.
Here’s today’s news from a U.S. perspective:
And here it is with news added in from Australia, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and the U.K.:
Another way to bypass international news gatekeepers is to allow stories to be automatically geotagged as they are filed, and published on a map, like the Yahoo Newsglobe. This kind of coverage is becoming more feasible by the day: Take this week’s announcement by the AP of an application that would not only offer location-specific content via new GPS-enabled iPhones, but solicit geotagged news and photos from users.
Mobile and digital technologies are shrinking the distances between local reporters from around the world and global news consumers. Such developments signal the death of the top-down, “foreign” news bureau, which interprets the goings-on in one country for the citizens of another. Given the right interfaces, the news will just be the news, near or far, always available.
This the latest in our ongoing Atlas of Media Maps series, leading up to next Tuesday’s Beyond Broadcast conference.
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