Work / Systems mapping
Journalism Ecosystem Model
An agent-based simulation of how platforms, ad markets, ownership, and subscriptions create news deserts.
In 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, Heather Chaplin and I commissioned Francis Tseng, then an independent researcher at the Jain Family Institute, to build an interactive model of what we were watching happen to local journalism.
We narrowed it to one question: how do population density, social media use, ownership, and subscribers shape where news deserts form? We worked closely with Tseng to define the model’s parameters, and I proposed further improvements to its interface.
Proposed interface
The project stopped when the funding ran out. We still experiment with the model as new data comes in.