The next speaker in this final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Helena Atteneder, whose focus is on news deserts and their mapping. Maps of news deserts construct spatial knowledge about journalism; news deserts themselves are a concept which refers to a lack of sufficient, reliable, and diverse local news, and this problem has been well recognised under this and other terms for some time.
But the term is also problematic due to its normative assumptions and descriptive fuzziness, and to approach this via mapping itself poses some notable questions. Mapping constructs rather than merely depicting spatial knowledge; this is true for cartographic maps of local journalism as much as for any other kinds of mapping.
Maps, in other words, are performative, constructing presence, absence, and relationality; they are shaped by the choices of the cartographers and data compilers; yet for all this they are still also useful tools for further analysis. What do maps of news deserts contribute, then, and what are the power dynamics they are embedded in?
Maps can be critiqued from the perspective of cartosyntactics (the technical aspects: data sources, projections, cartosemantics (meaning, narrative, classification), cartopragmatics (positionality of map-makers and users), and structural contexts (political economy, history, infrastructures that condition all of this).
This project applied this framework to three European news desert mapping projects: Local Media for Democracy (LM4D), at a national level across the EU; Wüstenradar, at a district level in Germany; and Local News Provision in England, at a postcode level.
LM4D provides a chloropleth risk index across the 27 EU member states, shading countries from very low to very high risk; this reinforces assumptions of methodological nationalism, treating the nation as a natural container even though this is questionable especially for border regions. This also constructs a moral geography, and is intended for policymakers who can then act on such democratic fragility. But it is insufficiently detailed for in-depth analysis.
Wüstenradar focusses on the period of 1992-2023, tracking news availability at the district level in Germany over a period when official German press statistics were abandoned (in 1996); it reduces a multi-dimensional phenomenon to one variable: the number of independent daily outlets. The 1992 baseline shapes the story that is told here.
Local News Provision in England is built on a commercial ecosystem provided by ArcGIS StoryMap, which provides a multi-semantic layer but thereby also inherits certain settings from this platform; this provides very fine-grained data at the level of postcodes, but does not fully document its approaches and assumptions.
These three cases have common blind spots, then: unstated cartographic defaults (Mercator projection, chloropleths, colour choices); a deficit-oriented framing (focussing on risk and decline rather than resilience and adaptation); and several others. But such criticism does not undermine the validity of these projects; maps remain useful for solving problems, but such underlying assumptions need to be fully reflected and critiqued. Mapping representations (e.g. as news deserts, focussing on the deficit narrative) can become self-fulfilling prophecies.
