Mapping the News

Mapping the News can be taken in many different ways I suppose. You could look at that term and say to your self "well they're obviously talking about making weather maps, or political maps right?" And yes, you could be completely right. Or better yet, you could probably just list the different maps that the news uses these days. Everything from the before mentioned weather and political maps to voting patterns, to even simple road maps used as examples in a breaking story of some sort. But what if we took this title and just applied it directly to a map? We could use dot density methods to identify news stations, news paper offices, distribution centers, and the same for all other media sources. We could use graduated symbol methods for identifying locations of and magnitude of coverage areas or even migration symbols to show distribution routes as well. So, instead of the news mapping us, we could map the news! A novel concept if I may say so myself. We could put the media under the cartographic microscope and show their patterns. Better yet, we could make an array of maps showing where our media personalities live or just make a simple chloropleth map depicting the percentage of people employed by the media. So, the point here is not only that we "map makers" could work for the media and produce maps to support what ever topic they may wish us to, but we could hold them at the point of observation as well. I just figured it would be a nice twist to throw in the "mercinary factor" on this blog =)