Trinity Mirror launch beta local news map

As reported by The Guardian, Trinity Mirror have today announced the launch of a map-based local news service on their Liverpool Echo website.

Chief Executive Sly Bailey said that the service was a follow-up to the development of a series of hyper-local websites across the group.

"As a next step we're launching a map-based news service across our regional sites with our editorial content geo-tagged and pinpointed to postcode level bringing our brands ever closer to our users and this is live in a public beta today on the Liverpool Echo."



A few smaller examples of this approach have been around for a while - most notably the SE1 News Map - but this is the first major news publisher to try this map based approach.

A quick look at the story tags suggests there are 541 geo-tagged stories on the Liverpool site from the last two and a half months - and that presents something of a design and usability challenge to present this volume of content within a single map window on the web.

Update: Journalism.co.uk looks at where the rest of the UK local/regional news providers currently are in the geo-tagging game.