Friday, January 30. 2009

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.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Media & Maps at 09:42 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Well, it's not so bad -- I think the text on the map explains it reasonably well.
The problem is that it's tendentious since the numbers are out of context: we don't know whether these community development corporations are unuasual (as CDCs) or as properties in general. I'm not altogether confident that the accompanying article would be any better...
With regard to locating stories (sorry, I changed the subject), what about Washington Post's "Time-Space" feature (http://specials.washingtonpost.com/timespace/world/). I thought that was rather nice...

#1 Charles Siegel on 2009-02-02 16:37 (Reply)

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