News place-making: applying ‘mental mapping’ to explore the journalistic interpretive community

Abstract

Scholarship in visual communications, media, and geography explore how news media assign meanings to environment through narratives of and about place. In this study, however, the author aims to move scholarship from evaluating journalistic place representations to exploring the cultural and ideological processes of how these place representations come to be. Understanding how journalists construct place adds depth to knowledge about news as a social and cultural construction, and contributes to previous research on news place-characterizations. This study enacts a methodology called ‘mental mapping’ and serves as a call for communication scholars to consider such participatory methods. Data for this study come from interviews with 30 participants, including reporters from three newspapers, public officials, and residents of Iowa City, USA. In the end, this study identifies a visual methodology for exploring the role and influence of how journalists work and represent place in the news, a process the author calls news place-making.

Differentiating distance in local and hyperlocal news

“…Hess and Waller (2014) argue that news media and journalists occupy 'geo-social' positions when drawing connections between geographic territories and wider social spaces, which inform audiences' development of a 'sense of place'. When geography is the ideological focus of narratives of social construction, the news media occupy important roles in representations of place and in place-making itself (Gutsche, 2014;Harte et al, 2017). They actively contribute to the (re)production of a sense of place through representations of local voices and communities, both to themselves and within wider information flows (Hess and Waller, 2014).…”

17. Journalism and Geography

“…Just as the telephone and transoceanic cables "unbundled" global news from geographic territoriality by transmitting news from "far-away lands" to "civilization" within packs of communication about foreign economies, war, and personalities (Brooker-Gross 1985), news today operates in a world of emerging geographicawareness software and content (Akoh & Ahiabenu 2012). Mobile phones, smart watches, drones, and advanced satellite and telecommunication systems move digital communication to even the most distant locations in ways that continue to blur notions of time, proximity, and geography as users watch what is "afar" from "home" (der Derian 2009;Goggin, Martin & Dwyer 2015;Gutsche 2014a). This is not to suggest that today's processes of geographic mediatization occur alternatively to when places are formed among audiences as they were presented from the pulpit or in the town square (Carey 2009).…”

Journalism and the “Social Sphere”

“…Journalistic boundary work helps to explore the role of journalism in shaping centreperiphery relations, and the patrolling, maintenance, and changing performative nature of journalism in constructing socially constructed boundaries (Gutsche 2014a(Gutsche , 2014b. Too often, however, boundary work is adopted within journalism studies to provide an inward-looking approach around the norms and conventions shaping the journalistic profession.…”