fix journalism a conversation about journalism’s future

Author: Michael Higdon | 10.01.2008

Geo coding is using geographically coded content so it’ll appear on a map like on Flickr.

A great idea that Chris Vannoy helped me realize is to make a news site homepage a big map of the city and to have all of your news geocoded according to its location. Then you can make the blips color coded based on type of news: education, politics, events, crime, profile, all your beats basically.  People can turn the blips on and off accordingly. This is done in some places but it’s really hard to find. National Geographic does it but I can’t find their map and so does a Gannett paper in Cincinnati.

There were a few problems with this idea though. Political news would be centered primarily on state houses and other city council locations. Some news is trend driven and so not really based on an address or longitude/latitude. A lot of stories would be non-mappable.

Then I started thinking about our concept of community/niche journalism. Many people believed niche journalism was geographically driven (as in I live in Seven Hills housing community in Las Vegas or Summerlin or Spanish Hills or Sparks) so I must only care about what happens within 5 miles of my house.

But we kind of proved that wrong because people are transient. They may live in Incline Village but commute 30 miles to work in Reno. When I worked at The Indianapolis Star, readers complained that the niche tabloids didn’t have enough news about the OTHER suburb and too much news about their suburb. They wanted to know what was going on where their kids go to school, friends live and where they work.

Therefore people’s interests are related to both geographic locations and economic status, life styles, political preferences, etc. Or more specifically I live by the University so that news matters to me based on location but I’m not interested in Mexican lifestyles (I live in Mexitown) so geography doesn’t matter. The list goes on.

SO!

What if you made that map, not based necessarily on the location of the news event all the time but based on who is effected? Events and happenings are clearly located on the map where they took place. But instead of political news being on the state house building, the blips are located in the places where people are effected. A bill is passed talking about zoning changes, so now 5 blips show up in different neighborhoods.

It’s safe to say people might center their searches around their homes and work places first before zooming out. And even if they don’t, know you’ve got visually-driven news that is based on familiar locations.

This of course, would require your newsroom to know the community and parts of the community extremely well. Major dailies need not apply to this model. MoJo and small web-based newsrooms could prosper from a model like this.