Printed Matters

I think we are well past the point where online journalism is a trend in journalism. Time to be a little more discerning and take a look at what’s important, right now, in online journalism. I’ll divide it up into three sections: Gathering the News, Augmenting the News and Delivering the News.

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The Geo Mashup plugin for Wordpress looks like an easy way to geotag blog posts. This should generate a map somewhere on my site…let’s see!

Update: it works fine. I had to make a couple of changes to template files to get it to display a map somewhere on my site, which it now does if you look at the maps tab in my menu. Also you need to apply to Google for a maps API for your domain.

So I’m probably not going to be using it a whole lot, since my blogging is done from the comfort of my house and is usually about topics which don’t have a particular locale. But it’s a useful demonstration of how easy it can be to geotag things.

One final note: it adds GeoRSS tags to the RSS feeds but not to the Atom feed.

So now, down in the states, they’re giving away prizes for things I did four years ago for a small community paper up north. The Spokesman-Review (this announcement from Editor’s Weblog calls it the Spokane-Review, but it’s not) got an award for Most Innovative Business Model from the International Newsmedia Marketing Association (INMA) for its “free business directory that judges said showed the potential for a disruptive business model that taps into newspapers’ unique strengths: established commercial relationships with local businesses and trust with local audiences.”

Absolutely this is something that every newspaper that serves a particular geographic region should be doing. It goes toward the paper’s ability to “own” the web in its area. They should also be using the directory to monetize other portions of their site, particularly search. Oh wait, they’re still using a lame Google-driven search widget. Pretty hard to monetize that, then.

The Editor’s Weblog article says “it does fit within the range of services that a newspaper should offer: helping readers and users to access local databases and relevant information about their community’s businesses.” Exactly. Anything and everything that you can database and then use in mashups with your other content in other parts of your site should, even must, be done.

The model – make it free, then upsell it – is also exactly right. Having a business directory (or any kind of directory) where businesses have to buy in makes the directory worse than useless. Nothing is more useless than an incomplete or out-of-date directory.

I did this four years ago, and nobody gave me a prize. Still, I’m glad that newspaper organizations are starting to recognize the importance of doing things on the web that couldn’t be done in the paper.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about alternative interfaces for news delivery on news aggregation sites.

It seems to me that a lot of focus has been placed on the time component of a news event. And rightly so, of course: news is about what is new. On major news sites, they’ll put links to the latest stories from today or yesterday (100s of them sometimes). The Star makes sure you know how fresh their breaking news is by putting a timestamp on the story in red. This Dutch site takes another look at the time component, and introduces the concept of a newsriver. They include a visualization of the hourly volume of news over the past hour. I wrote about this before.

That’s an improvement, but it doesn’t quite get to the fact that news stories are about events. It would actually be more informative to know when the event happened rather than when the first stories started coming out about it. The Dutch site only approximates that using the time that the stories come in on their feed.

I’m thinking about an interface where the events are the prime factors, rather than the stories about the events. Sure, the number of stories, comments and blog posts coming out about an event is valuable information as well, as a kind of measurement of the interest the event has generated and an approximation of its news value. But the stories are not the important objects, I’m thinking, the events themselves are.

So as a first stab at a new kind of interface for a news aggregator, imagine one that lists things in strict chronological order, from most recent to last, according to when the events transpired, and not when the stories began to be generated. Then, something like how blog tag clouds work, you increase the font size or change the colour or do something to indicate the level of interest in the event and, if it is important, draw attention to it.

What about space?

But events don’t just happen in time, they also happen in space. I don’t think enough attention has been paid to the three spatial dimensions. Why not give every event a location in space, by geotagging the stories and photographs that it generates? Then you can include a map along with your list of stories, with flags at all the event points. The map can zoom and center so that it just covers all the points of interest. The flags could be larger or smaller or have different colours to indicate their importance, as determined by the amount of interest that has been generated on the Internet.

Time Slider

Now we can do things with this data. I envision a kind of time slider interface under the map, where you can change the time parameters. If the default is to show on the front page all the stories from 24 hours ago to present, you can slide a pointer back to include all the stories from a full week. The map automatically zooms out and recenters to accommodate the new information. Including another pointer would allow you to fucus in on a particular time span, so you could see all and only what happened between two and three days ago.

The magic of AJAX would allow the story list to be updated at the same time as you pull the slider around.

There are more things you can do on the single page dedicated to that event. Let’s call it the event page. Here you could list the headlines and snippets of stories, posts, comments, etc. that had been generated by the event. But you could also list, in chronological order, other events that had happened at that location, for example, at city hall. You could pull in pictures that had been taken at that location from Flickr, for example, which already has geotagging built in. You could include a map which shows all the points of interest that had been mentioned in the stories about that event.

You could also syndicate your event page via geotagging of your RSS feeds. for use on Google Local etc.

I think geo-tagging will be a major driver of innovation on news websites in the near future.

Update 1: To be fair, I am far from the first to think along these lines, as a quick Google on the title of my post shows. But I think the concept of treating the events as the primal objects and the time slider are my babies.

Update 2: just saw this TechCrunch post on how Google has added geotagged data as overlays on their maps. Erick Schonfeld asked what other data overlays we’d like to see, and I suggested news.