Sunsetting mapping.news

mapping.news was a project designed to track where local news occurs in realtime by analyzing the text of their articles. Unfortunately, I've decided to sunset it indefinitely.

I'm really proud of the progress I made for the ~year and a half it ran. However, I don't want a product I cannot maintain, manually validate, and trust myself to pollute the ecosystem with half-baked information.

The app used a rudimentary pipeline that certainly could've been better. I would've loved to do structured evaluations, for instance, or improve the frontend, do some of the tricker analyses that were bottlenecked by the shoddier aspects of the data pipeline. If curiosity strikes, there's more information about how I built it on the "about" section of the website, or in a presentation I gave to the Oxford Media Policy Summer Institute last year.

Geocoding local journalism taught me a lot, and many of the lessons learned I've already brought to my new gig. So I will miss logging on and seeing the latest Gracie Mansion controversy or Washington Square Park lookalike contest.

Mapping news in realtime remains an important gap in the literature — however, that gap has recently gotten much smaller thanks to some excellent work out of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. There, they've developed a pipeline with robust methodology to do accomplish a very similar task in Charlotte, NC. As part of their work, Tow Center identified and solved a number of similar problems thoughtfully — location disambiguation, topic grouping, handling publications without easily-accessible feeds, and more. And, their interactive tool is just a blast to use.