Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
Use of Data
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Redlands, California, USA (headquarters) · 49 offices worldwide · Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.
Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc.) is the world's leading geographic information system (GIS) software company — the maker of ArcGIS, the platform on which the majority of the world's spatial analysis, mapping, and geographic data management is conducted. Founded in 1969 in Redlands, California, by Jack and Laura Dangermond with $1,100 in personal savings, it has grown over more than five decades into a privately held global company serving more than 350,000 organizations across government, science, environmental conservation, emergency management, journalism, commercial real estate, logistics, public health, and dozens of other sectors. Esri estimates it commands approximately 40% of the global GIS software market and claims more than one million active users worldwide. The company has never accepted outside investment — Jack Dangermond, who grew up in Redlands and whose Dutch immigrant parents ran a local plant nursery, remains founder and president alongside Laura — and its independence from the shareholder pressures that drive most technology companies has allowed it to make long time-horizon investments in research, development, and the nonprofit sector that would be difficult under outside ownership.
The company's guiding phrase — "the science of where" — encapsulates its founding conviction that geography is not merely a descriptive tool but an analytical one: that asking where is happening reveals patterns, relationships, and causes that are invisible when data is treated as purely numerical or textual. Jack Dangermond has described GIS as "a sort of intelligent nervous system for our planet at a time when humanity desperately needs one to address the environmental and humanitarian crises at hand." The claim is large, but the scale of Esri's deployment — in emergency response systems, public health surveillance, environmental monitoring, urban planning, journalism, and national security — gives it substance.
Jack Dangermond grew up in Redlands, California, where his family ran a plant nursery — an origin that he has said gave him both an early appreciation of the land and an education in entrepreneurship and customer relationships. He studied landscape architecture and environmental science before enrolling at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he and Laura Dangermond both worked in the university's Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis — one of the earliest academic centers exploring the use of computing for spatial analysis and mapmaking. The Lab's work, under the direction of Howard T. Fisher and later Carl Steinitz, was developing the conceptual and computational foundations of what would become GIS. Jack and Laura Dangermond saw the technology's potential for real-world decision-making — specifically for the land-use and environmental planning work that was becoming increasingly complex as development pressure on American landscapes accelerated in the late 1960s.
They returned to Redlands in 1969 and founded ESRI — initially operating from the Dangermond family home, surrounded by orange groves, with $1,100 of their own savings. The company began as a land-use consulting firm, performing environmental studies for projects including an interstate highway from Milwaukee to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and helping Mobil Oil choose the location for the new town of Reston, Virginia. Its first software customer was the Puerto Rico Planning Board. These early projects were not merely commercially important — they established the principle that geographic analysis could and should inform major decisions about how land is used and how communities are shaped, a philosophy that has remained constant through the company's evolution from consulting firm to global software company.
For its first decade, ESRI's work was primarily consulting and custom project work. The transition to commercial software began in 1982, when ESRI launched ARC/INFO — the first commercial GIS software product widely adopted outside research and government settings. ARC/INFO ran on minicomputers and workstations and gave users the ability to store, analyze, and map geographic data using a command-line interface. It was sophisticated, capable, and expensive, but it demonstrated that GIS could be packaged and sold rather than custom-built for each client. The product's success in government agencies — particularly in natural resources management, environmental regulation, and urban planning — established ESRI as the dominant commercial GIS vendor through the 1980s.
The 1990s brought ArcView GIS, a significant expansion of the user base through a graphical interface that made spatial analysis accessible to users who were not GIS specialists. Where ARC/INFO had required technical expertise, ArcView could be operated by planners, scientists, and analysts who needed maps and spatial analysis without deep GIS training. The product's success coincided with the explosion of digital geographic data — satellite imagery, GPS coordinates, demographic data, environmental monitoring data — that made GIS increasingly valuable across a wider range of applications. By the mid-1990s, Esri had established the market dominance it has maintained ever since.
ArcGIS is Esri's current product family — a cloud-based, web-enabled GIS platform that supports spatial data creation, management, analysis, and visualization across desktop, web, and mobile environments. It is the platform on which billions of maps are created daily worldwide, from the dashboards tracking COVID-19 vaccination rates that were used by public health agencies during the pandemic to the satellite imagery analysis used by environmental journalists to document deforestation, from the flood risk mapping used by FEMA to the logistics routing used by delivery companies. The platform's scope encompasses professional GIS tools for specialists, web-based mapping for organizational communication, and increasingly artificial intelligence integrations that allow natural language querying of geographic data.
Desktop / Professional
ArcGIS Pro
The professional desktop GIS application for advanced spatial analysis, cartography, data management, and 3D visualization. The successor to ArcGIS Desktop and the primary tool for professional GIS analysts.
Cloud Platform
ArcGIS Online
Esri's cloud-based GIS platform for creating, sharing, and using maps and geographic data through a web browser. Powers organizational GIS without local software installation. Used widely in journalism, government, and education.
Enterprise
ArcGIS Enterprise
The on-premises or hybrid deployment of the ArcGIS platform for organizations requiring data sovereignty, integration with internal systems, or customized GIS infrastructure. Used by government agencies, utilities, and defense organizations.
Storytelling
ArcGIS StoryMaps
A narrative mapping platform enabling journalists, researchers, and communicators to combine interactive maps with text, images, video, and multimedia into scrollable narrative experiences. Widely used in news organizations for data journalism and interactive features.
Data Visualization
ArcGIS Insights
A web-based analytics workbench for exploratory spatial data analysis, designed for analysts working across spatial and tabular data without deep GIS expertise.
Living Atlas
ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World
Esri's curated collection of global geographic data — basemaps, imagery, demographic data, environmental data, and real-time information — available to ArcGIS users as a shared data commons. The authoritative spatial data layer for many journalism and research applications.
Esri's relevance to journalism and media is substantial and growing. ArcGIS StoryMaps has been adopted by major news organizations — including NPR, Reuters, BBC, and many regional newspapers and digital news outlets — for building interactive narrative journalism that combines maps with multimedia storytelling. The platform's combination of geographic analysis and accessible web publishing makes it particularly suited to the kind of data journalism that has become central to accountability reporting: mapping election results, visualizing environmental contamination, tracking the geography of crime or poverty or health outcomes, illustrating the spatial dimensions of policy decisions. Esri has an active journalism partnerships program and provides academic and nonprofit licensing that gives smaller newsrooms access to professional GIS tools at reduced cost.
The use of satellite imagery analysis — a capability enabled by Esri's integration of commercial satellite data into the ArcGIS platform — has become significant in conflict reporting and environmental journalism. Outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Reuters have used Esri-powered satellite analysis to document construction of military facilities, verify claims about atrocities, track the retreat of glaciers, and map the extent of deforestation. The combination of commercially available satellite imagery and accessible GIS analysis tools has democratized what was previously a capability restricted to intelligence agencies and well-funded academic research centers.
Esri's philanthropic commitments — which Dangermond has described as inseparable from the company's identity — include the donation of hundreds of millions of dollars in software, data, and technical expertise to nonprofits, research institutions, universities, and conservation organizations. The Esri Conservation Program provides GIS software and support to conservation and environmental organizations at no cost. Environmental nonprofits — from The Nature Conservancy to the Wildlife Conservation Society to hundreds of smaller land trusts — rely on Esri's donated software for habitat mapping, protected area management, and conservation planning. Dangermond has also made major personal conservation commitments, including purchasing significant tracts of California land for permanent protection.
The company's continued independence from outside investors is a structural feature Dangermond has consistently cited as essential to its mission. Private ownership allows Esri to invest heavily in long-term research and development rather than managing quarterly earnings expectations; to donate software at scales that would be difficult to justify to outside shareholders; and to maintain a company culture focused on users and outcomes rather than on financial metrics. "We don't have any financial investors. We've been able to do what we believe is right," Dangermond said in a 2024 Mongabay interview marking more than fifty years since the company's founding.
Esri's products are available through subscription and licensing at esri.com. ArcGIS Online offers a free public tier for basic mapping. Academic and nonprofit licensing is available through the Esri Education and Nonprofit programs. ArcGIS StoryMaps is accessible through ArcGIS Online and is used by many journalism organizations under these agreements. Esri's developer resources — including APIs, SDKs, and open-data integrations — are at developers.arcgis.com. The Esri User Conference, held annually in San Diego, is one of the largest GIS gatherings in the world, drawing tens of thousands of practitioners from across sectors. Esri Press publishes books on GIS, spatial analysis, and related subjects at esri.com/en-us/esri-press.