Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap’s objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

In most online news sites, layout and placement of a given article is decided by editors who, because they’re human, have natural bias. According to Max Weber, the most obvious truth about thinking is that no human being can possibly grasp the whole of reality he or she confronts. Humans can only make sense of an aspect of reality—a selection from the infinite aggregate of events. As Weber puts it, “all knowledge of cultural reality … is always knowledge from particular points of view. There can be no such thing as an absolutely ‘objective’ scientific analysis of culture or … of ‘social phenomena’ independent of special and ‘one-sided’ viewpoints …”

Google News automatically groups news stories with similar content, and places them based on algorithmic results; hence it shows the “group bias” of the world’s media.

In Newsmap the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article; richer gets richer—the more coverage a story is given, the bigger the cell, the most visible it becomes.

Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business.

Currently, the Internet presents a highly disorganized collage of information. Many of us are working in an information-soaked world. There is too much of everything. We are subject everywhere to a sensory overload of images, bombarded with information; in magazines and advertisements, on TV, radio, in the cityscape. The Internet is a wonderful communication tool, but day after day we find ourselves constantly dealing with information overload. Today, the internet presents a new challenge, the wide and unregulated distribution of information requires new visual paradigms to organize, simplify and analyze large amounts of data. New user interface challenges are arising to deal with all that overwhelming quantity of information. Sometimes a simple visual reorganization of information is all that is necessary in order to perceive a familiar whole in an entirely new way.

Newsmap then, does not pretend to replace the Google News aggregator. It is an application that simply demonstrates visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media. It is not thought to display an unbiased view of the news; on the contrary it is thought to ironically accentuate the bias of it.