The Speedy Cartographers Who Map the News for The New York Times

When Malaysia Airlines flight 17 went down over Ukraine in July, the graphics team at The New York Times sprang into action. Because of the ongoing conflict on the ground, they already had lots of maps of the area. But they wanted to show more than just the crash site.
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The New York Times graphics team compiled data from several sources to make this map of the MH17 crash site in a couple hours.Tim Wallace/The New York Times

When Malaysia Airlines flight 17 went down over Ukraine in July, the graphics team at The New York Times sprang into action. Because of the ongoing conflict on the ground, they already had lots of maps of the area. But they wanted to show more than just the crash site. The map above is the result: MH17 had flown close to restricted airspace, flying at 33,000 feet on a flight route that had been closed below 32,000 feet.

Making the map required wrangling data from a bunch of sources, says Tim Wallace, a cartographer and graphics editor at The Times. Two or three people put that map together in about 2 hours, Wallace says. "It's like a BitTorrent of graphic making. We all take our little bit and cram through it as fast as we can."

One of Wallace's jobs was mapping the flight paths planes in the region are allowed to take. "We had to crack a PDF, reproject it, and get it on our map, so that was a task I had for about 45 minutes." Meanwhile, other people worked to nail down the crash site, figure out where the plane would have gone from there, and map the boundaries of restricted areas imposed by U.S. and European air navigation authorities. (See the original version of this map, and others related to the crash of MH17 here.)

The Times has the luxury of having both a map department and a graphics department that includes several cartographers. The map department specializes in making reference maps in no time, Wallace says, like when there's an explosion in Baghdad and the story is going live in 10 minutes. Every once in a while, something happens in a remote part of the world, where even Open Street Map has no data. In those cases, the map department will work from satellite imagery and draw a map from hand, Wallace says. "That's something they're very good at, and fast."

The graphics department, on the other hand, specializes in more complex maps.

They are in constant contact with the paper's reporters and editors, but they also do a lot of their own reporting, Wallace says. Back in March, for example, when they started seeing reports that Russian ships had been spotted at the Ukrainian port city Sebastopol, they started contacting satellite imagery companies until they found one that had recent images of the area. They sent these images to defense analysts, who concluded that the Russians had formed a naval blockade that was preventing several Ukrainian naval ships from leaving port. (You can find these maps if you scroll down a ways on this compilation of maps depicting the crisis in Ukraine).

Tim Wallace is a cartographer and graphics editor at The New York Times.

Courtesy of Tim Wallace

One of the biggest challenges for the graphics team, Wallace says, is dealing with uncertainty. "Sometimes we'll hear a report, and it seems huge, but we can't confirm it. It's very frustrating," he said. "There's this stutter point where if it's true we have to start now. But if it's not, it's going to be a huge waste of time."

They also have to deal with incorporating uncertainty into their maps. A recent map of territory held by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, for example, uses blurry red and yellow shading to indicate regions controlled by ISIS and areas of recurring attacks. The same map uses light grey hatching to indicate sparsely populated regions. "You don't want to put a hard line around that," Wallace said. "It's not like you cross a river and all of a sudden it's sparsely populated."

Wallace is particularly proud of the map below, which the team made in August to depict damage caused by fighting in Gaza (see the full interactive version here). When fighting broke out, the graphics team pulled up images from NASA's Landsat 8 satellite to look for changes on the ground. "It looked to us like you could actually kind of see vehicle tracks, and possibly you could see where vegetation had been tamped down or there had been denuding," he said.

But that wasn't good enough for publication. The team asked NASA scientist Jamon Van Den Hoek to have a look at the images, and he agreed that vegetation losses they were seeing were probably due to human activity, not natural causes. They also ran the maps by a defense analyst. "Getting experts to confirm your hunches in a day is not easy," Wallace said.

In fact, it took four or five people about two days to make that map, he says. They used Photoshop to look for changes between satellite images taken roughly a month apart and double checked this method by running some of the same images through ENVI, a more sophisticated (but much slower) imaging processing software developed for remote sensing. This map and related ones showing vegetation loss and building damage ran as a standalone graphic online and as a one-page spread directly adjacent to other Gaza coverage in the print newspaper.

"This was totally novel for us to do change detection on something that doesn't end up in a remote sensing journal," Wallace said.

A few weeks later, the United Nations came out with its own analysis of satellite imagery in Gaza and confirmed their findings. "That felt really good that we got it right," Wallace said.

Orange areas show the regions that changed most drastically between satellite images taken about a month apart.

Tim Wallace/The New York Times