World Press Freedom 2019

The United States has fallen three places in the World Press Freedom Index since last year. Every year Reporters Without Borders rank the countries of the world based on an assessment of each country's record of supporting the freedom of the press. This year the United States is ranked 48th out of 180 countries, and the RWF say that the media climate in the U.S. is now “problematic”.

When President Trump took office the United States was ranked 41st of all the countries in the world. They have dropped down the list every year since Trump became President. Other countries to have fallen down the list this year are Venezuela (down five at 148th), Russia (down one place at 149th) and China (177th down one place). For the third year running Norway tops the list. Finland have moved up two places to come second in this year's index and Sweden are in third place overall.

You can find out where every country in the world ranks on the 2019 World Press Freedom Index interactive map. Countries on the map are colored based on their rankings. Countries colored a pale yellow are deemed 'satisfactory'. Countries colored orange are seen as 'problematic'. Red countries are in a 'difficult situation' and black countries are in a 'very difficult situation'.

The very pale yellow colored countries (which the RWF say are colored white) are classified as 'good'. This year 24% of the 180 countries ranked by Reporters Without Borders have qualified as 'good' in the index. Last year it was 26%. If you click on a country on the map you can read the score awarded by RWF and click on the 'read more' button to view the overall assessment of press freedom in the selected country.

2018 Journalist Deaths

76 journalists around the world were killed in 2018. The Committee to Protect Journalists' database includes journalists who were murdered in the last 12 months and also journalists who were killed in action (from crossfire or combat on assignment).

Afghanistan, Mexico and Syria, receptively, were the three countries where the most journalists were killed in 2018. The CPJ's 2018 Map of Journalism Deaths includes four motive confirmed murders of journalists in the United States in the last year. All four of these deaths were from the attack on the Capital Gazette. On June 28th Jarrod Ramos shot and killed five employees of the Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. Four of the victims were journalists working for the newspaper, the other victim was a sales assistant.

The CPJ map includes a number of filters which allow you to explore the database of journalist deaths by location and type of death. The map also includes a date filter which allows you to directly compare the year's map of journalist deaths with maps for previous years (going back to 1992).

The BBC's Alarmist Migrant Map

The BBC has today come under fire for misrepresenting the scale of the number of migrants who have recently attempted to enter the UK. In 2018 539 migrants were discovered trying to enter the UK on small boats. The number of migrants attempting to enter the UK in this manner has risen over the last few months.

The BBC has attempted to visualize the recent rise in the number of migrants discovered trying to enter the UK using an animated interactive map. The BBC's Where Migrants Have Been Discovered by Authorities map animates through the time period from November 1st to Jan 3rd, showing the day and the locations where migrants have been found trying to enter the UK.

The map uses scaled markers to represent the number of migrants discovered at each location. It is these scaled markers where the BBC has run into trouble. To aid legibility the BBC has provided a handy key to this scale:



Can you see the problem with this scale? Jo Wood has. On Twitter she pointed out that on this scale "the '80 or more' circle is over 130 times the area of the 'fewer than 5' circle". Jo has even helped the BBC out by providing a proportional scale.



The issue of immigration is hugely contentious in a Britain preoccupied by Brexit. The BBC's map only serves to hugely exaggerate the problem of migrants trying to enter the UK on small vessels. I would like to think that this misrepresentation of the problem is an unintentional error by the BBC's cartographers. But then I would also like to think that the BBC would take a little more care over its graphics.

Where is the News?

Forbes has carried out an analysis of the Television News Archive to create a series of maps showing which areas of the world have featured in the news programs of some of the major television networks. The Forbes article Mapping a Decade of Television News includes maps showing the coverage around the world of the BBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.

Unfortunately the article only has static maps which does make them a little difficult to read and compare. However these maps are PNG images which means you can click on them and view them in full-screen mode. Personally I can't make out a huge difference in the global coverage of the different television news channels. The obvious major difference is that the BBC has much more UK news than the American stations and the American news channels cover American news more than the BBC.

Overall there seems to be a lot of agreement about where the major news stories are around the world. At the end of the article there are two videos of animated maps showing where the featured news channels have focused their attention around the world over time. These animated maps show the focus of the news channels traveling around the world responding to global events and then moving elsewhere as the world's attention moves on.

America's News Deserts

Wikipedia's List of Defunct Newspapers of the United States includes the names of over 1,000 newspapers which are no longer in print. Many of these papers collapsed decades ago. However a large proportion of these newspapers are victims of the loss of 50% of print newspaper readers in the last 20 years.

Last year the Colombia Journalism Review mapped out America's Growing News Deserts. Their map shows the number of local newspapers left in each county in the United States. One thing that the map reveals is that a lot of counties no longer have a single local newspaper in print.

Ohio University has now released a new interactive map which visualizes the circulation of daily newspapers and the percentage of the population that subscribe to newspapers. The Media Deserts Map includes two choropleth layers. One layer shows the number of daily newspapers in a county and the other shows the circulation penetration. Using the map it is possible to see the number of daily newspapers in a county and the percent of the population (over the age of 18) who are reading them.

Where Sinclair Owns the Local News

Last week Deadspin created a video of news anchors across the United States reading the exact same script about the "one-sided news" in America. The video effectively revealed the dangers of allowing the Sinclair Broadcast Group to continue to vacuum up local television stations across America.

The company now owns 193 local television stations. Vox has released an interactive map which show where these Sinclair owned local television stations operate. The map in Sinclair’s pro-Trump news is taking over local TV allows you to select a state and then a media market within that state to find out how many stations Sinclair owns locally. The map also reveals the names of those local television stations and the number of people those stations serve.

The USA - A Democracy for Sale

Saudi Arabia wants to build two nuclear reactors. This might seem surprising for a country with lots of oil and a seemingly unlimited potential for solar energy. So why does Saudi Arabia want to go nuclear? Obviously Saudi Arabia is keen to join the ever growing list of countries that own their own nuclear weapons. Perhaps that is why it wants two nuclear reactor and is also reluctant to deny that it might use them to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

Luckily nuclear non-proliferation treaties mean that the USA can't sell nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately the Trump administration is pursuing a deal to try to sell the Saudi's the two nuclear reactors anyway.

You might wonder why the Americans would want to help another brutal dictatorship get nuclear weapons. There are two possible reasons. One is that this could be just another example of Trump's 'America First' policy. America just grabbing the money while it can and screwing the consequences for the whole world. Another reason could be the influence that Saudi Arabia has over American legislators.

We all know that in American politics money talks. So let's take a look at Middle East Lobbying: The Influence Game. Al-Monitor's interactive map reveals the amount of money that Middle East countries spend on lobbying the American government. Every year Al-Monitor reveals how much money Middle-East countries spend on lobbying and also assess how successful each country has been in its lobbying.

The kings of Middle-East lobbying are of course Saudi Arabia. Last year Saudi Arabia spent $14 million in lobbying American politicians. Obviously just spending that money doesn't mean that they were successful in buying any influence. To determine if the USA's democracy is really for sale we would have to see if the Saudi's actually achieved anything, such as becoming Trump's first official visit or successfully buying nuclear technology.

The World's News - 2017

2017 was a momentous year. It began with the swearing in of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. It ended with the USA withdrawing from the UN's New York Declaration, a policy adopted unanimously by 193 states to help improve the fate of refugees and immigrants. You can read more about the major events of last year in World 2017.

World 2017 is a summary of the major news, sports events and scientific discoveries that happened last year. It provides an overview of the global political, economic and social events which shaped 2017. As you scroll through World 2017 you progress chronologically through the year. As you progress an interactive globe rotates and shows you the locations of major events around the world, while the scrolling sidebar provides a summary of each of these global events.

Under the hood World 2017 is using Klokan Technologies' WebGL Earth. WebGL Earth is an open-source virtual globe. The WebGL Earth JavaScript API is based on the popular Leaflet JavaScript API and is therefore relatively simple to use, especially if you have experience of using the Leaflet mapping library.

No News is Bad News

Wikipedia's List of Defunct Newspapers of the United States includes the names of over 1,000 newspapers which are no longer in print. Many of these papers collapsed decades ago. However a large proportion of these newspapers are victims of the loss of 50% of print newspaper readers in the last 20 years.

The Colombia Journalism Review's map of America's Growing News Deserts shows the number of local newspapers left in each county in the United States. The choropleth layer on the map shows the number of daily newspapers in each county. It reveals that a lot of counties no longer have a single local newspaper in print.

The data for the map comes from 2015. The Colombia Journalism Review is currently working on updating the data for the map. It is therefore keen to hear if any local newspapers are missing from their database or if the map includes newspapers which no longer exist (contact details for the CJR can be found in the map's accompanying article).

Mapping a Rohingya Refugee Camp

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims, fleeing religious persecution in Myanmar, are now living in government-run refugee camps in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. As more and more desperate refugees arrive from Myanmar the Kutupalong refugee camp grows in size everyday. The AFP news agency reports that it is set to house 800,000 people, which would make it the largest refugee camp in the world.

The AFP has interviewed a number of refugees who now live in the Kutupalong refugee camp. You can read their stories on the KFP's Kutupalong: Rohingyas Hit Dead End interactive map. The map uses a recent satellite image of the camp as the base-map for these refugee stories. The use of a satellite image is very effective in conveying the sheer size of the Kutpalong camp. The numbered markers on the map provide access to the refugees interviewed by the KFP. You can read these stories simply by selecting the markers on the map.

Also See

Refugee Republic - an interactive map exploring life in the Domiz Refugee Camp in Iraqi Kurdistan
Hockey & Baseball Refugees - an online documentary exploring five Greek refugee camps

Do You Live Near a Freeway?

The Los Angeles Times can tell you how close you live to a freeway. Just enter your address and the LA Times will show you your house and the nearest freeway on an interactive map. It will also tell you if you are within the 500 foot zone where air pollution is highest or if you are within the 1,000 foot zone (where scientists advise that you shouldn't live).

The map is part of the newspaper's report into why L.A. keeps building homes within 500 feet of freeways. If you zoom in on a freeway on the interactive map you can see the most polluted 500 and 1,000 feet zones - shown in red and yellow respectively on the map. If you zoom out a little the zones will disappear and instead dots will show you how many people live within 1,000 feet of the freeway.

Later on in the LA Times report another interactive map shows you how many building permits the city has issued within 1,000 feet of a freeway since 2005. This map includes a slider control which allow you to change the year to see how these permits have accumulated over the years.

1,518 Mass Shootings Mapped

Since the tragedy of Sandy Hook there have been 1,518 mass shootings in the United States. In less than six years 1,715 people have been killed and 6,089 wounded in mass shootings. Vox has mapped all 1,518 of those mass shootings, using data from the Gun Violence Archive.

Vox's Mass Shootings interactive map shows the location of 1,518 mass shootings across the United States since December 2012. If you click on a marker on the map you can view the date and location of the mass shooting and the number of people who were killed and injured.


Of course people aren't just killed by guns in mass shootings. According to data from the Gun Violence Archive there have already been 11,686 people killed by guns in 2017 and 23,717 injuries.

If you go to the Charts and Maps section of the Gun Violence Archive you can view static maps of all the mass shootings this year, all the deaths from guns this year and all gun incidents so far in 2017.


Why has there been 1,518 mass shootings in the USA in less than 6 years? One common denominator is guns. There may be a Starbucks on every corner in America but there are more gun shops on more corners. There are 64,747 gun dealers in the US. That's more gun dealers than grocery stores & McDonald's restaurants. It also means that there are nearly six gun dealers for every Starbucks.

Firearms & Frappuccinos compares the number of Starbucks to the number of firearm dealers in the United States. If you enter the name of a town into the map you can see the locations of all the local Starbucks coffee shops and the locations of all the local gun dealers. So, for example, if you search for Dallas, you will discover that there are more than twice as many gun dealers in the city as there are Starbucks stores.


Back in 2015 Oregon Live created an interactive map to show where gun deaths most occurred in the United States. The US Gun Deaths Map 2004-2010 shows the average number of gun deaths per 100,000 county residents. The map therefore provides some insight into where gun deaths are occurring more in proportion to the population.

It is important when viewing this map to understand that this is not a map of only gun homicides. The map also shows deaths occurring from suicide attempts. The map does reveal however that there are some clear geographical differences in the number of gun deaths per population in different regions of the United States.


After two mass shootings in quick succession in San Bernardino and Colorado Springs in 2015 the Guardian created an interesting map which revealed how much money political representatives received in political donations from the National Rifle Association and where those representatives stand on gun legislation.

The Gun Deaths in Your District map shows how many gun deaths there have been in every congressional district. If you select a district on the map you can find out how many gun deaths there have been in the district.

Below the map you can view details about the district's three political representatives, including information on how much money they have received from the gun lobby and how they have voted on gun rights and gun control legislation.

Detroit's Deadliest Days

50 years ago, in July 1967, a riot broke out in Detroit which lasted five days. By the time the riot ended 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, over 7,200 people had been arrested and more than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Riot the Detroit News has released a map exploring every single one of the 43 deaths that occurred during the riot. The map doesn't attempt to explain the causes of the riot or how it progressed. It just attempts to explain who died, where they died and how.

Five Deadly Days in Detroit uses Carto's Odyssey.js story map format to provide a simple chronological account of what happened in Detroit. The basemap used for the story map is a United States Geological Survey map from 1968. As you scroll through Five Deadly Days in Detroit the map pans to the location where one of the 43 people were killed. The text beneath the map provides an account of who died and how they were killed. This text is illustrated with vintage images from the Detroit News coverage of the riot in 1967.

Where's North Korea?

Can you correctly identify the location of North Korea on an unlabeled map? If you can then you are more likely to favor a diplomatic and non-military response to North Korea than someone who can't find it on a map.

The New York Times asked 1,746 people to find North Korea on a map. 36 percent got it right. These same 1,746 people were then asked a series of questions about what sort of measures they would support the USA in carrying out against North Korea. Those who could identify North Korea on a map were more in favor of economic sanctions. To be fair even only 9% of those who couldn't find North Korea on a map supported the idea of an American military response.


A similar experiment was carried out in 2014 asking Americans if they could locate Ukraine on a map of the world. The experiment, carried out by political scientists from Dartmouth College, Harvard University and Princeton University, had similar results. Only one in six Americans could correctly locate Ukraine on a map.

The Americans were also asked a number of questions about how the USA should respond to Russia's invasion of the Crimean peninsula. The further the respondents guess was from the correct location then the more likely they were to support military intervention by the USA.

It appears that geographic literacy makes people more diplomatic and less militaristic.

Mapping the Freedom of the Press

Mapping Media Freedom is mapping threats to the media throughout the European Union and neighboring countries. It is a joint initiative from the Index on Censorship, the European Federation of Journalists and Reporters Without Borders. The map uses clustered markers to show the locations of crowdsourced reports of threats, violations or limitations faced by journalists, newspapers or other media.

The map sidebar provides links to read more about the reports shown in the current map view. This list updates automatically as you pan and zoom the map. If you click on an individual map marker or one of these headlines in the map sidebar you can read the full submitted report.

You can filter the reports shown on the map by location, date range or category. The categories include different types of censorship and limits to press freedom. They also include the option to filter by sex, type of journalist and the source of the threat to media freedom.

Mapping the World at War

Since 1969 the indigenous people of Indonesia's Papua and West Papua states have been fighting for independence. Some estimates suggest that more than 100,000 people have died in the struggle. Unfortunately this is just one of many long ongoing conflicts around the world which go largely ignored in the west.

IRIN, the non-profit humanitarian news and analysis team, wants to draw attention to the forgotten conflicts of the world. To help achieve this aim it has created an interactive map of all the current ongoing conflicts around the world. The World's Conflicts map shows where conflicts are currently taking place across the globe.

Each conflict is shown on the map with a scaled marker. The size of the markers represent the length of time that each conflict has been continuing for. You can click on an individual marker to read more about the nature of the conflict, the main protagonists involved and an estimate of the number of casualties involved.


The Global Conflict Tracker is another map which shows the location of conflicts around the globe. This map from the Center for Preventive Action is designed to show "ongoing conflicts around the world of concern to the United States".

The map provides two main views, 'Impact on U.S. Interests' and 'Conflict Status'. If you switch between these two views the color of the conflict markers change to show the severity of the impact to U.S. interests or the severity of the conflict itself. If you select a conflict on the map you can click through to view a detailed account of the conflict, including the historical background and recent developments.


ConflictMap.org also provide an interactive map of armed conflicts currently taking place around the world. The map shows where conflicts are happening and provides links to the latest news stories about the conflicts.

The red circles around the conflict markers on the map indicate the current severity of the conflict (high, medium or low). The colors of the markers provide an indication of the current level of activity (red indicates the most active). If you click on a marker you are provided with a series of links to the latest news reports about the selected conflict.

The 2017 Terrorist Attacks Map.

According to Wikipedia's List of Terrorist Incidents in 2017 over 2,000 people have already been killed in terrorist attacks this year. You can see where those terrorist attacks took place on the 2017 Terrorist Attacks map. This map from PeaceTech Lab uses the data from Wikipedia's chronology of terrorist attacks to show where attacks have taken place around the globe.

The locations of terrorist attacks which have taken place this year are shown on the map by colored, scaled markers. The colors of the markers indicate the terrorist group responsible for the attack. The size of the circular markers represent the number of fatalities resulting from the terrorist attacks.

You can also view PeaceTech Lab's 2016 Terrorist Attacks map.

The Rise of American Anti-Semitism

ProPublica has logged more than 330 incidents of anti-Semitism, which took place in just three months, from early November to early February. Even more worrying is the fact that in 2017 there has already been 145 bomb threats made against Jewish organizations in the USA. ProPublica has mapped both Reports of Swastika Graffiti and Bomb Threats to Jewish Community Centers and Organizations.

The Bomb Threats visualization uses a static map to show the locations of all 145 bomb threats. Beneath the large map is a timeline of each of the incidents (with the most recent first). Each date in the timeline also includes a smaller static map showing the locations of the bomb threats made on that date.

The Reports of Swastika Graffiti map uses a simple story map template. You can read about some of the mapped reports by using the 'back' and 'next' buttons. Unfortunately the map itself has had all its interactivity turned off. This means that you can't zoom and pan the map or click on the markers to learn more about each of the mapped incidents. However you can learn more about some of the incidents and the rise of anti-Semitism in the United States in ProPublica's article In an Angry and Fearful Nation, an Outbreak of Anti-Semitism.

Make America Hate Again

In the last year the number of anti-Muslim hate groups in America grew from 34 to 101. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center the overall rise of hate groups is a direct result of the 'incendiary rhetoric' used by Donald Trump. In its annual census of extremist groups the SPLC claims that "Trump’s run for office electrified the radical right, which saw in him a champion of the idea that America is fundamentally a white man’s country".

The SPLC's interactive Hate Map tracks the growing number of hate groups operating in the United States. The map uses colored markers to indicate the category of each hate group shown on the map. If you select a marker on the map you can click-through to learn more about what this type of hate group believes and how they operate.

Donald Trump was asked just yesterday, by an Israeli journalist, how he planned to address rising anti-Semitism in  America. He responded by saying,

"Well, I just want to say that we are, you know, very honored by the victory that we had -- 316 electoral college votes. We were not supposed to crack 220. You know that, right? There was no way to 221, but then they said there's no way to 270. And there's tremendous enthusiasm out there".

I think that this is a convoluted way of saying that the President believes in 'self-love not hate'. Maybe if we all love ourselves as much as Donald Trump loves himself there would be little room left for hate in the world.

A less favorable interpretation of Trump's answer might be that he has no intention to address the growing number of hate groups and hate crimes in America.

Putting News on the Map

Unfiltered.news is an interesting way to explore what news stories are currently being reported in countries around the world. At the heart of Unfiltered.news is an interactive cartogram visualizing the top news stories being reported in each country.

The map shows the top 100 news stories from Google News for each country on the map. If you select a country's circle on the map the top news stories from the country will load in the map sidebar and the topics will appear in the circle.

The size of the words indicate the number of times the topic has been mentioned in the news. If you select a topic from the map the news stories relating to that topic will then appear in the map sidebar. A timeline will also appear which allows you to explore the news trends for that topic over time.


Heatmap News also uses the Google News API. As the name suggests Heatmap News provides a visual heat map of locations around the world which are currently in the news.

The heatmap overlay provides a visual guide as to where news stories are currently breaking around the world. You can also click on countries on the map to read the latest news stories from that country listed on Google News. Perhaps the most useful feature in Heatmap News is the 'Date' filter. This allows you to search for news stories by date as well as location. This can be useful if you want to research which news stories were happening at different locations on specific dates.


If you don't like your news filtered by Google then you can always go direct to the websites of newspapers around the world. Newspaper Map is an interactive map which provides links to thousands of daily newspapers across the globe.

Individual newspapers are located on the map using colored map markers. The colors of the markers indicate the language that the paper is published in. If you click on the markers you can find a link to the newspaper's website and a link to read the paper via Google Translate.


The US News Map from Georgia Tech allows you to search for keywords in historical American newspapers and then view the results across space and time. The map searches for words in the Library of Congress' database of historical newspapers which includes American newspapers from 1836 to 1922 (a database of more than 10 million newspaper pages).

The application is an amazing resource for visualizing the frequency that words or names appeared in American newspapers over this period. The map helps visualize where newspapers were writing about any given subject and how interest in that subject might have changed over time.