Why Doesn’t Every Paper Have “Map of the Week?”
I’m sure many readers know of the Toronto Star’s regular feature “Map of the Week.” It’s put together by Web editor Patrick Cain and covers all kinds of topics for the Greater Toronto Area that are not necessarily related to stories in the paper. He even includes a “Nerd Box” to share some of the tech and presentation issues he faces.
A few thoughts:
- Why doesn’t every paper do this? Yes it takes some work, but the maps are immediate draws for the local community - no matter if they show car or bike accidents caused by cars or architecture parking tickets given. Can you help your local paper start such a feature and “do good for geography?”
- Wouldn’t Patrick (or his peers at other papers) be great speakers at your conference or on GIS Day or in your class?
- With the new administrations talk about more transparency, the time is right for even more maps in the media here in the U.S. but also worldwide.
- This has got to be a lot of work and the commitment to one a week is impressive. Great job!
- In a related effort, I can’t say enough about FortiusOne’s dataset of the day on its blog. Now, there’s no doubt the goal is to introduce its Finder and Maker tools to the world, but this is another regular effort (no daily, but regularly) to inform, engage the world through maps related to timely news topics. And, yes, I mention this because Finder! could be a great resource for data for Maps of Week.
