Maps from the Newsroom to the Pen Plotter
Tim Wallace, Senior Editor for Geography at The New York Times, toured maps made for the news and for fun, from newsroom projects built on building footprints and satellite imagery to grid-based art drawn by a pen plotter. In the Q&A, Tim made the case that everything about a map, from its shape and tone to what gets labeled, shapes the reader's experience. The talk was presented at the H3 Conference 2026 in New York City.
Geography across the newsroom
Tim has been at the Times for most of the last 15 years, working mainly with the graphics desk but also with climate, visual investigations, investigations and business: essentially anyone in the newsroom who needs geography, GIS or cartography.
The talk opened with an older project that mapped the Microsoft building footprints, one of the first large buildings datasets. Mapping only that one part of the built environment revealed patterns visible from afar, like the long lots in Louisiana and different kinds of developments in Arizona. The result reads more or less like a population density map that also shows the built environment.
For a piece showing how cold and frozen much of the US was at the end of last winter, Tim used Fused to pan-sharpen satellite imagery, which, as far as Tim knows, is not terribly easy to do in Google Earth Engine.
Grids show up often in Tim's work, but H3 has not yet. One project Tim pointed to as a possible fit: years of work with colleague Marco Hernandez mapping the extent of damage in Ukraine with extruded grids, built on a dataset Tim described as the gold standard for conflict data derived from SAR.
Maps for fun: swims and pen plotters
Tim is an open water swimmer and showed an experimental map of an event swum this summer, simulating the swarm of swimmers alongside the tides and currents.
A couple of years ago, Tim bought a pen plotter and caught the bug. Line work plots well, and so do grids:
- An extruded grid of the US with the Mississippi River system on top
- The New York City Subway in an oblique view with exaggerated topography
- What Tim calls the "Q*bert grid": nested rhombuses with different aggregations of population density, in pen on paper
- Mount Desert Island in Maine as a single square grid
- California generalized in four different ways
- New Mexico as a nested grid, a plot that initially took 8 hours
- US streets treated like string, and mountain peaks generalized into shapes Tim compared to upside-down Bugles snacks
From the Q&A
- Maps shape perception. Everything about a map (its shape, look, tone and labels) shapes your experience. Tim argued that Google changed everyone's mental map starting around 2007 or 2008, and that news maps aim to read quickly on the one thing a story is about.
- AI. The biggest change so far is internal tooling that produces maps faster and better than before. The cartography itself has not changed much yet, though Tim expects it will.