Mousing over a marker displays the story's headline. For more details, you'll have to double-click the map and see them at the host map site (Wayfaring.com).
I only placed the stories that actually happened in a location or that were about a topic that has a particular location (for example, the Target shareholders meeting is plotted on the Target Headquarters building in Minneapolis). Stories about concepts were left off the map unless they had a scene of a specific place illustrating that concept (as any good radio story should have, given time enough to report it).
I created this map using Wayfaring.com, which is a simple do-it-yourself map-making Web site, with a clean, no-frills interface. This takes the programming out of map mashups. It also takes out a lot of the flexibility. I couldn't find a way to embed hyperlinks to the stories in the descriptions, much less audio. But it's a good start.
Ideally a map like this on a journalism Web site would be sortable by date, topic and reporter, too. But the most important function of a feature like this is that someone can zoom in on their community and find the journalism being done about it. Using a map like this over many months could also help editors find gaps in their coverage of a particular region.
Translating this kind of map to be viewable on a mobile device should be the easy part. Generating compelling content, as always, is what's so tricky.
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