Guardian Local due for 2010 launch

The Guardian have announced a move into the provision of local news on the web in 2010 with the launch of Guardian Local in three UK cities.

Sarah Hartley, the Guardian local launch editor said:

"While researching developments at the grassroots of community journalism, I've been impressed by the range and depth of coverage from local websites and blogs. This experimental project reflects both the shifting nature of journalism and the reality on the ground."

Recruitment is now underway to find professional bloggers (job title: Beatblogger) to work on the three initial services in Leeds, Cardiff and Edinburgh.

The successful candidate will be a confident blogger, know their yelps from their tweets, have a passion for local news and understand how to build relationships with the local community. A journalism qualification is desirable but not essential.

Using maps on news websites

Paul Bradshaw posted some thoughts yesterday on the use of maps on news websites, a subject often discussed on this blog.

Most recent 'highlights' are discussed such as MPs expenses, although Mapumental from MySociety is not listed, nor is my favourite longstanding example of a local news map, the London SE1 News Map.

There is a good list of the advantages in using maps:

• They provide an easy way to grasp a story at a glance
• They allow users to drill down to relevant information local to them very quickly
• Maps can be created very easily, and added to relatively easily by non-journalists
• Maps draw on structured data, making them a very useful way to present data such as schools tables, crime statistics or petrol prices
• They can be automated, updating in response to real-time information

However, the post doesn't really get stuck into the difficulties and disadvantages of this approach. I've outlined a couple of points below which I believe are major barriers to a successful map-based news website.

User Experience / Usability
User research suggests that most of the audience still see a map as a route-finding device, a answer to "show me how to get from A to B" or "tell me where this building is", whereas news has long been consumed in a linear fashion, "Give me the big story of the day, what's the second most important item, and so on".

Mapping functionality is also quite complicated for a lot of web users and you cannot rely on the audience easily understanding how to pan, zoom, scroll a map, or cope with the differences in graphical pin-points, hover panels, embedded audio/video content.

Web users generally want to get at information quickly, particularly time-sensitive journalism content, and any design or interface barriers that prevent this can be quite a turn-off.

Geo-tagging or "Where do i put this story?"
It would be simply fantastic to be able to assign a latitude/longitude tag to every piece of content we create so that it can appear at the correct location on a map.

The reality is that this is simply not possible and even if it were possible, further difficulties emerge.

For example, imagine a bunch of stories appearing this week on transfer deadline day relating to one football club making several new player signings, whilst also being in the news for other financial or business reasons. We can easily tag all stories with the lat/long relating to the football club's home stadium, but how do users easily find and navigate between a cluster of stories located at the same point on the map?

Often there is more than one relevant location that can be associated with a news story.
For example, a person from location A, in partnership with another person from location B, is arrested for an armed robbery in location C, and the forthcoming trial will take place at location D.

Can we geo-tag this story with all relevant locations? Does the technology understand the difference between each location? Does it matter?

Importantly, whatever the technology or editorial strategy delivers, how do we communicate this to our audience within the mapping interface? An interface which is already quite complicated and overcrowded with the standard set of mapping tools, place labels, and options for different graphical layers.

Then we have the regional story.
For example, House prices in Devon have fallen by X.

Devon is generally not a point on a map (it might be if the map displayed all of Europe in a small enough image size on screen and it was not possible to zoom in!) and yet we have a potentially important news story that needs to be geo-tagged.

Postcodes introduce a similar problem as they are also polygonal areas rather than specific points. Tagging content with postcode does not provide a dot on the map for that content to be assigned to, it provides a region boundary similar to county, borough, electoral ward, and the many other areas of this type.

News stories can relate to other shape patterns. A news story about a river or a train journey needs a line on the map.

Some of these examples can be solved by providing a single point approximation to represent the story, although this can also be dangerous.

The BNP membership map from 2008 provided several lessons in this area. At one point, whilst trying not to pinpoint exact houses, postcodes where used to make the information less specific. Unfortunately the mapping tool, in trying to be clever with the data, plotted the information at a specific point in the centre of the postcode, thereby seeming to be an accurate house-by-house set of data - but unfortunately pointing at all the wrong points on the map.

What's the big story?
As I mentioned under the usability heading above, audiences have become very familiar with consuming news in a certain way that is very different to the map based approach.

A map is perfect for showing me something that is happening near to me, especially if it's a story that wouldn't normally make the top headlines, but I still want someone to tell me the big news, even if it is a little further away.


And that, I think, is the key target right now. Not simply solving these challenges and aiming to get as much of our content as possible onto a map, but finding the right way to include mapping as part of the consumption of news content.

Speaking at Where2.0 in 2008 Adrian Holovaty stated that 'One question i like to ask myself is, would my site succeed without maps?'.

It's a very good question to keep asking.

Microsoft to partner with local newspapers for MSN Local News Map

Microsoft, through their MSN Local portal, are hoping to provide local news on a map, in partnership with local newspapers across the UK.

Peter Bale, executive producer of MSN, said: “We are hoping to take feeds from local newspapers and tag every piece of information to a map. Hyper-local news online has never been more important and we think this is a really interesting growth area.”

Very interested to see how this compares with Trinity Mirror's beta news map in Merseyside which has improved since it's launch last year but still does not feel very user friendly.

Geo-tagging news content is a really complex task and presenting this on a map defies the usual logic of consuming news in order of importance, can't wait to see how Microsoft tackle this.

(From Telegraph.co.uk)

'Kitemark' could distinguish journalism from 'web noise'

From Press Gazette:-

A 'digital kitemark' to differentiate quality journalism from 'the noise of the web' should be introduced, according to a new report published this week.

“A digital kitemark… would identify and differentiate professional journalism amidst the noise of the web,” the report says.

In my experience websites are already pretty good at providing this differentiation already.

A banner that says Guardian, The Times, The Sun or The News of The World or even Bob's News Blog or Amy's News Blog pretty much signifies the type of journalism and 'professionalism' of those involved.

As for suggesting that the "noise of the web" is inferior, that somebody enthusiastically producing content because they are interested in the subject matter is somehow not as useful or interesting as somebody who has been paid money and told by their boss to write some words on this subject.... huge generalisations I know, but I think somebody might have missed the point somewhere along the line.

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.

Huffington Post goes local

From Media Guardian article - Huffington Post starts local news push.

The Huffington Post is planning to expand into local news across the US, founder Arianna Huffington said last night, beginning with a site edited for the community of Chicago.

Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in "dozens of US cities". The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.

Maybe it's a reflection of the popular discussion topics in Chicago but I found it interesting, and slightly amusing, that the proposed content is listed as "news, sport, crime, ..."