Google Earth: potencialidades para o jornalismo a partir da geografia da comunicação

Abstract

Maps are resources used for location since the beginning of civilizations, with the aim of making life easier for society. With technological advances, new location resources were created, such as virtual maps generated from satellites. Despite seeming just a spatial representation of the globe, the creation of maps involves issues such as scales that depend on the surface to be published and even political and social issues, so maps go far beyond representations of reality. With satellite technology, the capture of images much closer to reality has changed some geographical perspectives over the years. This process has intensified with the internet and geolocation programs. In addition, it was not only Geography that benefited from technology, in journalism, digital appears as another means of information with the possibility that new journalistic narratives are built. In this space, Google Earth emerges as a possibility to invest in the construction of journalistic narratives. Our guiding question aims to investigate how Google Earth can enhance journalistic narratives and build other spatial perspectives closer to social reality. For this, we defined as main objective to identify the potential of Google Earth to contextualize journalistic narratives and, thus, build reality. The methodological perspective we adopted is the Case Study as an Illustration to understand how five journalistic products made use of Google Earth. Finally, we come to some considerations that show us that Google Earth can be used to report the journalistic event in a more contextualized, innovative and captivating way to the consumer and at the same time taking the reader/user of the information to the place of the facts in a more contextualized way. closer to the reality portrayed.