Almost as soon as the Al Jazeera network launched its English-language channel late in 2006, a young boy began peering at its viewers through an opening in a wall on the screen. He turned up at regular intervals in an advertisement typical of those used by television channels to promote their outlet and its take on the world  - or the promise to take viewers out into that world. What is interesting about this particular image is that it is not clear whether the boy is on the outside looking in, or on the inside looking out. Viewers are invited to wonder where they are in relation to the boy, and to meet his gaze. It is clear from the curiosity in his eyes, and from the schoolbag on his back, which give him the attributes of a learner, that he wants to know more, suggesting we should meet him in this, too. As well as emplacing us in a liminal space, the advertisement is marketing a certain way of doing journalism. ‘You need to be able to see the world from many perspectives in order to report the world back to the world’, explains a reporter. The image is a quotidian illustration of the influential argument pursued by Massey (1993) that distinctions usually thought easy (to the extent that they are thought at all), such as inside/outside and near/far, are called into question by a relational politics of place. What makes them interesting, particularly under conditions of globalization, is that they do not only bifurcate. They arise and become visible through a point of contact, which can also be a point of connection. Journalists who report the world back to itself (and the newsrooms they work for) can be thought of as discursive cartographers whose maps are drawn from both borders and connecting points. One particular geography is in focus in this paper: that of inequality in the stories of world events that journalists have been telling global publics for the past decade. How are voices used to make mediated space into place in what Jackson (1989) called “maps of meaning”? And how do journalists approach the task of giving visibility and voice to those experiencing unequal conditions? Analysis of global television news output (207 Al Jazeera English and CNNI broadcasts, from 2009 and 2019) and interviews with journalists (conducted in 2020-21) are used to gain insights into the discursive connections in mediated places that arise when three different sorts of actors meet: the reporter in the field, the marginalized or ‘disadvantaged, and the viewer, as emplaced by the news narrative.