Saturday, April 25, 2009

News sites that use maps

More and more news Web sites are using maps in their on-line reporting.  This can work in at least two ways:

Maps specific to a story -- where the scope of the story encompasses many places and it's useful to represent those places, and information about them, on a map.  Here's an example from my own news organization:


What interests this project more is sites that place stories on a map -- when the story is about a specific geographic place, that location is included in the story's online metadata.  

This allows Web sites to show the scope of their reporting on a map and allows users to select content based on location.  It can also reveal interesting and surprising trends in a given news organization's coverage bias.  Here's a Web only news site that claims to be representing Chicago's neighborhoods better than the city's two main newspapers:
http://www.chicagotalks.org/

I'm going to try to learn more about outside.in, the map provider Chicago Talks uses.

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