Unknown Speaker  0:00  
The local news research project was launched in 2008. It's based on the idea that we can use the geography of news or the spaciality of news as a useful lens for exploring ideas in journalism. What makes the local news project different is its focus on local news at the city, neighborhood and even street level. So we're looking at a much more micro level of mapping than has usually been done. The idea of using maps to investigate journalism's inspired by information visualization research, and that suggests that it's much easier to make sense of a huge mass of data if you translate it into graphic or visual form. The focus of this research so far has been on local news in the Greater Toronto Area. For the work we did on the Toronto Star in Ming Pao in 2008. We looked at 28 days of news coverage between January and August. For the three ethnic papers we looked at Jan the period January to August 2011. We also look in detail at each local news item, and whether it's a story or photograph, and an extract from it, references to geography. So if we take all the maps that we do for each individual news item for each story, and for each photograph, we can combine them and we can get a collective map that shows us the geography that's represented in the newspaper during our sample period. Maps like this suggests that some parts of the city are in and other parts are out. And this can lead us to questions about why this is, you know, does it have something to do with how we practice journalism? Does it illustrate our reliance on official sources there are a lot of institutions in the downtown. The mapping can also be used to compare patterns of news coverage among different news organizations. So for instance, this map of the news coverage of the Punjab Canadian Punjabi post shows a pretty different pattern from the Toronto Stars pattern spatial pattern of coverage. We've used the geography of news as the starting point for investigating a variety of subjects related to news in the city. So we've looked at how the Toronto Star covers the poorest areas of the city. We've looked at how the Chinese language newspaper Ming Pao portrays the GTA to newcomers and and we've looked at how ethnic newspapers portray other groups. Mapping has helped us understand the role of local news and its impact in all of these cases.

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