Another New Media Geography Challenge

Just the other day Maryn McKenna at Poynter (the website for journalists; I read it because I’m not trained as one) highlighted something I’d run into for years: local papers not including their location on each page. The articles are typically fine but if you arrive there via your favorite search engine, you have very little geographic context, unless you know there is only one such county with that name and in which state it belongs. Oh, you can try to tease out location from ads or weather information, but it’d be far better to have the location clearly stated in say a footer.

Now, onto another challenge the Web brings to the media. This one also involves geography, but in a different way. It’s the challenge of the orphan map. The user of a search engine will find a map. Here’s one from the Charlotte Observer. It’s an ok map, but where’s the context? How would I find the article that references the map? There’s no link on the map’s page. So, one must go back the main page of the paper website and either find the article there or do another search. I found the referencing article under “local news”. I propose such stories always include a clear statement about the source article and a link.