Geography and Journalism #esriuc

The session for news media at the EsriUC was easy to miss because it was on Sunday associated with the Business Summit. But it's importance is tied to how geospatial information and technology enters an era of mainstream adoption.

Two excellent presentations focused on not only how maps bring context to stories but when maps "serve as the central vehicle to create a narrative," as described by Roberto Suro, professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Managing Director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab.

Suro asked, "How do we recover the sense of narrative in an era of data overload? How, as a content creator, do we reestablish the authority of a story teller." Suro discussed where maps and visualization can foster a different journalistic technique. "What do you have to have to make a map tell a story? You have to start with the centrality of place. The "where" is the focal point around which the other elements circle," said Suro.

He mentioned how the most common narrative structure is chronological and how there are a lot of stories that combine chronology with geography. But to make maps more central to the narrative involves a small change in perspective. "The basic mechanical function is different [which is the] geotagging elements of information … and telling a narrative completely through maps," he said.

Matt Waite, a professor at the University of Nebraska's  College of Journalism and Mass Communications, and a Pulitzer Prize winner during his time at the St. Petersburg Times for his creation of PolitiFact.com, a fact-checking website that tracks what politicians are saying. Wait took today's publishers to task for using the same "byzantine" production model that's been in use for decades. "If we mess with this thing we are messing with the most foundational thing that we do ... Digital production is very flexible - publishers don't like to hear this," said Waite.

Waite said that, "We are creating a news database augmented by all sorts of data; there are subjects that we can connect to with a complete set of links. Rules can be broken."

He gave an example of how certain stories dealing with crime have certain structured data like addresses or historical crime information, that is, a geographic context. "You start to add these pieces of greater context and it becomes much more than a story; it is context; it is data. When you start to see news as part of a greater whole," said Waite.

Since, as a publisher of a geospatial magazine, we see the technology side of stories and often little about context. In our application articles we like maps to tell a story too. That's what we do as geographers. We tell a story. It may not be a news story like in newspapers or magazine, but maps communicate in a way that tabular information can not. And isn't that the story of GIS?

Directions Magazine’s NewsMap Features - Search and Display

We lauched NewsMap today...perhaps you've already seen it on our "yellow tab" on Directions Magazine. Our friends at Spatial Ideas developed this version of their LocoBuzz web mapping application specifically for us so that we could display our press releases and blog posts in a geographical index. I've been wanting to do this for years...kinda made sense for an online geospatial technology magazine to actually use a web map app in some way, no?

You'll note that we've released this in "beta" for now and we're interested in your feedback. But I encourage you to play around with its features.

For example (refere to image at right; click for larger graphic), the first thing you will notice is that there are a few symbols on the map with numbers in the middle. Keep clicking on the symbol (hopefully that's intuitive" and you'll zoom into the area of interest; more symbols may appear but hovering the mouse over the symbol will display a box with a brief caption of a press release or article. You'll see the headline and first few lines of the text. You can dismiss the box or click on the "newspaper" icon to go directly to the full version of the article; click the Facebook icon to post to Facebook.

You can also search for news. Use the search box to type in a word or phrase and it will search a 30-day archive of news. Check the "Get Latest Tweets" box and it will add tweets as well. Check the "Hide News" box to see only tweets. Check "Refresh" to bring you back to the original news selections.

At the bottom of the map is our news scroll for the past 24-hours. This will show you the latest news in the form of scolling boxes. Click the "i" icon to zoom into the location of the news and to display the news box. Click anywhere on the map and the scroll box turn into a single scroll line. Double-click the scroll line to go back to the scroll boxes.

For more information about the technology behind NewsMap, see our article today on our home page of Directions Magazine.

Geo Industry Leaders in Al Jazeera Video on Remote Sensing

Former GeoEye spokesperson and now the executive director of the GeoEye Foundation Mark Brender and Directions Media Editor in Chief Joe Francica are featured in an Al Jazeera video on satellite imagery use in the media. The story focuses on demonstrations in Tunisia whereby Tunisian bloggers were posting news about the Ben Ali government via Google Earth.

- Directions Magazine Featured Video

ABC Using Ushahidi to Crowdsource Flood Impact in Australia

Here’s the details of providing data and here’s the map built on Crowdmap.

Interestingly, Google’s site for the flood includes the map.

- ABC

EveryBlock Now offers Apartment Listings

In its 16 cities you now get appt listings.

Thanks to our friends at Cazoodle, EveryBlock will now let you know about apartments for rent in your neighborhood. Like our real-estate listings, these are useful even if you’re not in the market to find a new place—it’s interesting to know what’s happening in the local renter’s market.

- EveryBlock blog via @rww