ITN puts news on the map

Following Trinity Mirror's experiment with the Liverpool Echo, journalism.co.uk has reported on ITN's use of Google Maps to provide users with geo-located news stories.



The simple interface currently allows you to specify a minimum number of stories, a central location point and a time period over which you are interested in news content.

Upon entering this data the map view refreshes to display standard Google pin-points to illustrate stories nearby.

The above screenshot is the result of searching for a minimum of 5 stories nearest to Bristol from the last 7 days.

The fifth nearest news item that appears on the map is actually located in Portsmouth, nearly 100 miles from Bristol, so it's not exactly a local news service - but then ITN is not a local news provider so it would be wrong to expect too much content at this level of granularity.

However, the amount of content appearing on the map still seems a bit thin for a news provider such as ITN - presumably due to the number of news items that are not being geo-coded as they don't relate to a specific point on the map.