The Geography of News Project

This on-going research project, which has received funding from Concordia University (2000-2003), le Fonds québécois de recherche sur la société et la culture (2002-2005) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2004-2007, 2008-2011, 2011-2014) treats journalism as a practice of cartography. The research is concerned with the regional, national and international circulation of news, and how the circulation of news is related to forms of audience address. How, in other words, do news stories situate their audiences in the world? In the first phase of the project, we conducted quantitative news-flow studies of 10 newspapers in North America and Europe, to track the circulation of news stories from various places in the world. In the second phase, we conducted a number of qualitative textual analyses to determine how the news texts connected readers to international news events. Our current research focus, in a collaboration with Dr. Greg Nielsen, is on journalism as a medium of exclusion. We are analyzing a range of news texts concerning poverty and immigration from daily newspapers in North America and Europe, guided by the following research questions: Who is the implied audience for these texts? Who is excluded from that implied audience? And, how is the implied audience situated vis-à-vis the subject matter of the news texts? For further information, contact Dr. Mike Gasher atm.gasher@concordia.ca.