Mapping News Agencies

location of correspondents and bureaux of the major companies in the industry

Abstract

The paper shows the results of a 2016-2017 survey that mapped 3,557 correspondent placements of 122 news agencies, from main-office newsrooms to lonely stringers (freelance journalists), scattered throughout 1,044 cities in 192 countries. By taking geolocation data of these bureaux, and extracting geocoding coordinates from their postal addresses, maps were generated using geographic information systems (GIS) that enable to visualize the global imbalances of news networks. This paper proposes a methodology for mapping news flows, emphasizing a spatial factor – namely, the geographical location of bureaux and correspondents of news agencies – as a qualitative parameter of analysis and using the geographical categories of territory and region as theoretical references to analyze variables as location, spatial hierarchies, and types of operational structure of news agencies.