« Lessons in reinvention -- from Apple | Main | Personalized Online Calendars »

The power of maps in community-building

One of the things we talk about a lot here at Newspaper Next Central is how new technology allows information that has always existed to be collected, "mashed up," and disseminated in new and much more meaningful ways. The example we always use is the map.

Consider my colleague Steve Gray's point: Latitudes and longitudes for every location on Earth have existed for centuries. But only in the last 10 years have we seen people traveling to every tiny intersection in every small town to geocode it. Why now? Because, through new technology, all these codes can be amassed into a huge database and voilà! We can represent spatially anything we want, in a way we never could before.

Maps are all around us so we tend to take them for granted, and lots of newspapers are starting to capitalize on the power of maps to provide various kinds of information (see the list below). But a couple of recent events reminded me of how powerful different kinds of maps can be in a local community, and how easy it is for newspapers to create them.

First, in a session last week at API's Management of the Weekly Newspaper seminar, Ed Efchak, vice president of marketing for North Jersey Media Group, suggested to attendees that as a research exercise they ask each member of a consumer focus group to map his/her community on a blank sheet of paper. Of course that will produce as many different maps as there are members of the group, because each person will see different things, and will see the same things differently. This helps to highlight what's important to different people in the community, including some things we at newspapers tend to overlook or take for granted. It's a great idea that can provide great insight.

Second, we started talking in the seminar about the value of databased local information, which led us to the idea of mobile, location-based search. (Where's the nearest ATM/coffee shop/drug store/etc. to where I am right now?) Who better to amass and provide that information than a local newspaper? There are also plenty of revenue opportunities associated with this, both user transaction fees similar to directory assistance (but nowhere near as usurious!), and paid-search and expanded-listing opportunities for all the banks, coffee shops, drug stores, etc. Someone (not Starbucks, surprisingly) has already built for Apple's iPhone a Starbucks locator widget; we think that's just the tip of the iceberg for location-based information.

But the thing that really got me thinking was an episode this past weekend of public radio's This American Life. I'm not always a fan of the show -- often a little too weird and quirky for me -- but this episode (there's a link on the page to listen to it via streaming audio) was all about different kinds of maps, and the first segment, which lasts about eight minutes, is well worth listening to. How many new things would we see if we removed the obvious and mapped various aspects of our communities without the street grid as underlay? What could we learn if we took several unusual spatial data points and combined them so that, to paraphrase Colorado Mountain News Media's Steve Pope from the same seminar last week, we could go from raw data to information to real insight? It's possible to represent spatially pretty much any kind of information we want to, and that can provide an entirely new way of illuminating our communities.

As a thought-starter, below is a partial list, compiled by my colleague Steve Buttry, of some examples of mapping on newspapers' (and, at the bottom, some non-newspapers') Web sites. Some are obvious and widely done; some are a fascinating way to show part of a community's history; many are much richer for the inclusion of user-generated data; many have revenue opportunities on which we haven't yet capitalized; and some are great and imaginative examples of explaining local issues. All are worth checking out for ideas:

So how do you create an online map? Amy Gahran included in her post yesterday on the Poynter Institute's E-Media Tidbits blog this link to Google's instructions, as a starting point. (See the comments to that post for some other suggestions.)

Got a great online map idea? Other suggestions for online map tools? Please share them with us!

Posted by Elaine Clisham on October 24, 2007 12:06 PM |

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)