Journalism Conundrum: Perceiving Location and Geographic Space Norms and Values

Abstract

Journalists have been incorporating geographic space into their news work for centuries (Carey, 1987; Tuchman, 1978; Gasher, 2007; Mersey, 2009). The location of where the fire occurred, the parade took place, or the soccer match was played has always been a part of the story. However, in the process of incorporating geographic space into the story, how does that location of the news event matter to the news reader? Using the theoretical framework of Spatial Journalism (Schmitz Weiss, 2015), this study explores the perception of geographic space and how journalism might perpetuate existing notions of their definition of news in a geographic space (Hess & Waller, 2015) which combats the reality of what the public may identify as news near to them. Based on a national online survey administered to U.S. adults in fall 2017, the study finds that perceptions of proximity of news differ from existing journalistic structures.