From the Shipping News to Snapchat: Problems of Space, Place, and Power in Journalism

Abstract

When I moved with my family to Northern England from Miami in January 2018, I knew I was leaving the familiarities of my home country, my daily bouts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the occasional check-in with FOX News, and access to The New York Times on newsstands at Starbucks. What I didn’t realize was that in May 2018, I would be cut off from online access to my hometown newspaper, the Tomah Journal in Tomah, Wisconsin, when the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took hold. GDPR mandates that businesses with online content in the EU must seek a user’s permission to track her geographic location, how she uses the website, and what other sites she might visit online before she can access the company’s website. For businesses that do not comply with the law—as of April 2019, this includes hundreds of news outlets, including the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times—their websites are left fairly blank. A message on the Tribune’s website, for instance, reads: