Maps are important to journalism because location is a key part of many newsworthy events. Local stories on home invasions, road closures, and zoning disputes have geographic elements for which words alone are often inadequate—readers want to be able to visualize where an event occurred as well as know what happened. And for stories about natural disasters and terrorist attacks in unfamiliar locations, maps can satisfy the editor's need for an illustration as well as the reader's thirst for details. In addition to small, straightforward displays relating a single location to a geographic framework of boundaries, place names, and nearby landmarks, maps describing multiple locations can enrich feature stories covering phenomena as diverse as rare-bird sightings, contaminated wells, and school attendance zones. And in addition to decorating the page or television screen while highlighting the report, a map can reveal potentially meaningful patterns as well as help readers assess the likely effect on themselves and loved ones. The best example of this ability to engage audiences while communicating efficiently is the weather map, which has well-established roles in print and electronic journalism.
Scale, Distortion, and Generalization
Maps work by condensing information about places and distances into comparatively small, highly generalized graphic representations. The ratio of map distance to ground distance is calledscale.Sheet maps and atlas maps typically report their scale as a ratio or fraction such as 1:24,000 or 1/24,000, which means that an inch on the map represents 24,000 inches, or 2,000 feet, on the ground. Small-scale maps, with relatively small fractions like 1/100 million, require considerable generalization to reduce a large country, a continent, or the entire world to a display less than a foot wide. By contrast, a large-scale, 1:2,000 newspaper map two columns wide can show individual land parcels on a city block. Because viewers might not readily grasp ratio scales, large- and medium-scale news maps typically state their scale graphically, with a horizontal bar perhaps a half-inch long and a label indicating the corresponding distance. Bar scales on news maps generally represent a single distance, always in miles in American newspapers.
However appropriate on maps of neighborhoods or states, bar scales are potentially misleading on small-scale maps, where scale varies significantly from place to place as well as with direction. Flattening the spherical earth is a complex process, which requires drastic distortion of distance and shape. (On a rectangular world map, with a grid of evenly spaced meridians and parallels, north-south scale is constant while east-west scale approaches infinity near the poles—stretched from mere points into lines as long as the equator.) Although stretching is unavoidable on large-scale maps of neighborhoods or counties, geometric distortion is not noticeable if the map author selects an appropriate map projection. These maps are typically framed with aconformalprojection, the type used for topographic maps and nautical charts. Because scale at a point is the same in all directions on a conformal projection, circles and complex curves can retain their characteristic shapes. And because the area shown is not large, distances and areas are not noticeably distorted. By contrast, conformal projections like the Mercator, used for nautical charts to portray constant sailing directions as straight lines, are not recommended for small-scale maps, on which they can severely distort area. The classic example of aninappropriate map projection is the widely used Mercator world map, which portrays Greenland as roughly the same size as South America. Numerous projections suitable for whole-world or continental maps either preserve relative area or offer an appropriate compromise between distorted areas and distorted shapes and angles.
Generalization is unavoidable because map symbols are almost always proportionately thicker than the features they represent. Exaggerated width is blatantly obvious for boundary lines, which have no measurable width, and potentially troublesome for roads and streams. On a column-width news map covering a multi-county region at a scale of 1:1 million, a reliably visible line 1/50 inch thick requires a cartographic corridor nearly a third of a mile wide. To avoid clutter and confusion, the map author must separate nearby features as well as exaggerate some kinks and eliminate others—a meandering stream must look like a meandering stream, after all, even if the mapmaker must dampen curvature and reduce the number of bends. Which features are retained depends on the map's purpose. Good design requires a geographic framework of carefully selected background features as well as a graphic hierarchy in which essential features are more visually prominent than background details. Addition of a simplelocator insetat a smaller scale can relate the main map to a wider, more familiar geographic frame of reference. Adetail insetat a larger scale might be added to show part of the region more precisely.
Because of space limitations and the need to highlight relevant details, news maps are simpler and more focused than conventional reference and atlas maps, and complex map keys are rare. Instead of the environmental scientist's arcane symbolic codes, significant features might be identified with text-balloons similar to those in cartoons. (A prominent text-balloon at the top of a simple locator map can even substitute for a caption or headline.) Readily interpreted symbols include miniature highway shields to mark Interstate 95 and U.S. 40, interlocking brushstrokes to suggest tree cover, and color symbols that rely on familiar associations of green with vegetation, blue with water, and red with danger. Weather maps have their own readily understood conventions—simple pictograms predict rain, snow, or cloudy conditions for selected cities while spectral hues running from cold blue to warm red describe temperatures across the country.
History
Technological impediments explain the slow development of journalistic cartography. News maps were rare until the early twentieth century, when photographic engraving provided an efficient way to combine their idiosyncratic arrangement of lines and labels with words organized in lines and columns. In contrast to commercial cartography, for which comparatively intricate maps were engraved elegantly on copper plates or lithographic stones, newspaper maps were crafted by removing the non-ink areas from smooth blocks of soft metal or dense, durable wood to leave a “type-high” printing surface. Labels were either engraved crudely, letter by letter, or composed by inserting type characters in small troughs cut into the metal or wood. Town names on the famous Gerrymander map-cartoon (see next page), used to ridicule a purposely contorted election district and published in theBoston Gazetteon March 26, 1812, were engraved individually, as were labels on the election-district map that inspired it, published three weeks earlier in theBoston Weekly Messenger.During the American Civil War (1861–65), daily newspapers met the demand for timely battle reports by having multiple artisans work on separate sections of large maps.
Mass-circulation daily newspapers, which became prominent in the late nineteenth century, could afford full-time illustrators as well as photoengraving departments adept at supplying their high-speed presses with high-contrast line images, drawn in black ink and captured on film. (Halftone photographs, pioneered in the early 1880s by the New YorkDaily Graphic, were not common until the late 1890s.) Further down the urban hierarchy, small daily and weekly newspapers relied on news syndicates for maps, cartoons, crossword puzzles, and other illustrations as well as feature articles, short stories, and mass-market advertisements. Dispatched by train from a central engraving plant, thin metal stereoplates were integrated with local material from the newspaper's own typesetter—received as “boiler plate” and “edited with a saw,” this inexpensive filler encouraged an explosion of local newspapers in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some syndicatesdelivered features and serialized fiction, others transmitted more timely news by telegraph. News maps were infrequent, and rarely addressed local events. A feature syndicate might embellish a story about colonial activity in Africa or a forthcoming eclipse with a crude, hand-drawn map captured photographically, while an enterprising editor with a supply of stereotyped reference maps might add an X or Maltese cross to illustrate a wire report about a natural catastrophe on another continent.
Elkanah Tisdale's classic Gerrymander map-cartoon, a take-off on a previously published election-district map. First printed in theBoston Gazetteon March 26, 1812.
Source:Illustration from James Parton,Caricature and Other Comic Art(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1877), p. 316.
In January 1935 the Associated Press launched its WirePhoto network, which opened opportunities for more timely news maps. Although the facsimile transmission system was designed for continuous-tone photographs, rather than line drawings, AP artists learned to create graphically stable labels and line symbols. Separate weather maps for morning and afternoon newspapers were among the 50 or more images transmitted daily. One of the system's first news maps focused on the Saar Basin, site of a forthcoming plebiscite. Although the map situated the Saar between France and Germany and included portions of five other countries, lack of a bar scale made it difficult to judge the area's size and proximity to Paris and Frankfort. During World War II and the Korean War wire-service maps provided eager readers with a carefully censored, at-a-glance picture of the fighting. Several AP competitors entered the facsimile-photo business in the late 1930s, but few small daily newspapers were connected to a newsphoto network before the 1950s, when the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation introduced a comparatively inexpensive receiver/engraver.
Competition and new technology continued to transform journalistic cartography. After television, traffic congestion, and more hectic lifestyles killed off most big-city afternoon newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, the surviving morning dailies repackaged their content in a multitude of sections with specially designed front pages and abundant graphics. The Associated Press and United Press International encouraged this “design revolution” by increasing the amount and quality of graphic artwork offered subscribing publishers. In the 1980s smaller newspapers responded to the perceived threat ofUSA Today, a national newspaper with a brilliantly colored, full-page weather package, by investing in color presses, while larger newspapers retrofitted their letter presses for run-of-press color. Maps helped art directors enliven a section front with a controlled splash of color, but the most prominent beneficiary was the weather map. For example, at the SyracusePost-Standard, a medium-size daily that replaced its presses in 1998, color enhanced only 30 percent of the 3.2 nonweather maps printed on an average day in 2000—up markedly from .7 in 1985. And atThe New York Times, where the same rate rose from 4.3 in 1985 to 6.7 in 2000, only 13 percent of the millennial year's maps were in color (Monmonier, “Pressing Ahead”). The “Old Gray Lady” had capitulated to weekday color in 1997, largely to appease advertisers, but the most obvious cartographic impact was its delicately colored weather map.
Of the diverse factors underlying the increased prominence of newspaper maps, electronic computing was the most influential. The catalyst was the Knight-Ridder-Tribune (KRT) syndicate, which began distributing MacDraw graphics over a dedicated network in 1985, a year after Apple introduced its Macintosh computer. In 1987 the Associated Press encouraged subscribingnewspapers to download Macintosh graphics over an 800-number telephone line. Smaller newspapers that purchased a Macintosh and laser printer for downloading and customizing AP or KRT graphics quickly learned to illustrate local news with maps. Because subscriber loyalty hinges on detailed local coverage, it's hardly surprising that in the year 2000, local or regional events accounted for 87 percent of the SyracusePost-Standard's maps.
Mapped articles per issue
Source:Tabulated and created by author.
Maps in Contemporary Journalism
Driven by events, deadlines, and intense competition for readers' attention, news maps are functionally different from their counterparts in commercial and scientific cartography, and require a distinctive terminology. A key division separatesfact maps, which include most simple location maps, fromexplanatory maps, which are inherently more complex, and might even be used (perhaps with a caption) as sidebars or self-contained, “stand-alone” graphics.Anticipatory maps, which address forthcoming events as diverse as local marathons or overseas invasions, enjoy a comparatively generous lead time, often reflected in engaging designs and elaborate details. Small and largely decorative maps serve asfactoidsor “fever charts” (a term coined by Nigel Holmes while art director atTimein the 1980s) or as “standing sigs” (signature graphics) used daily to identify regional or world news briefs. Larger, more elaborate illustrations that combine geographic information with aesthetic appeal qualify as “flavour graphics” (a term introduced by Harold Evans, who editedU.S. News and World Reportin the late 1990s), a genre especially common in travel magazines, the Sunday travel sections of large metropolitan newspapers, and weekly news magazines.
A newspaper's cartography has a distinctive look because the design specifications that standardize its typography, headlines, and page layout include the type, symbols, and frames of its maps. Style guidelines for maps not only contribute to an integrated visual appearance but also minimize delay and confusion when breaking news requires a map. Because cartography is a prominent part of a newspaper's overall design, some art departments impose the house style on maps from syndicates and wire services like the Associated Press, which has its own distinctive cartographic style.
Despite advances in desktop mapping software, which would empower reporters as mapmakers, news publishers tend to treat maps like photographs and other images—as illustrations developed by specialists working in an art department outside the news room. Some newspapers have aseparate graphics department that is responsible for maps and other information graphics or a “graphics editor” who mediates between the news desk and the art department. Elsewhere the integration of illustrations and art relies on informal alliances— inviting the art director to the daily editorial meeting is a common concession. Because reporters and editors are rarely trained in graphic design and mapmaking, this division of labor is likely to persist. Even so, some newspapers committed to investigative reporting acquired a geographic information system and made the software available to reporters covering crime, elections, or the environment. The resulting maps are often team efforts involving reporters, editors, and graphics specialists.
Electronic journalism also uses maps. Despite poor resolution and troublesome receivers, television broadcasters had used maps sparingly since the 1950, mostly for weather reporting. Electronic graphic systems developed in the 1970s could generate simple locator maps—now in color, with improved contrast—as well as animated sequences with few labels. Dynamic cartography became the backbone of local and national weathercasts, where on-camera meteorologists interpreted an otherwise confusing mélange of animated forecast maps and Doppler radar displays. The Weather Channel, launched in 1982, combined a region-by-region canvass of weather and its effects with customized updates, advertised relentlessly as “Local on the Eights.” Traffic reports and war news also benefited. Animated maps crafted with guidance from retired military officers helped network newscasters cover the run-up to the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq war. Google Earth, a web-based mapping tool introduced in 2005, merged flyover animation with satellite imagery, and was quickly adopted for dramatic introductions to unfamiliar locations. Newspapers, which saw Internet distribution as essential for survival, enhanced their websites with interactive election maps and other dynamic displays.
Conclusion
News maps demonstrate that location matters. Their increased frequency and expanded role reflect changes in publishing economics and information technology as well as growing awareness of geography as news and of information graphics as visual decoration. The Internet's prowess in disseminating interactive, customized news reports has opened new opportunities for journalistic cartography.
—Mark Monmonier