Tag Archives: Mapping

Online Journalism Scandinavia: “Computer programming is journalism”

Image of Kristine LoweOnline Journalism Scandinavia this week looks at innovate use of Google mash-ups and online databases by the Norwegian press.

image of snails website

“Computer programming is also journalism,” Espen Andersen, the man charged with bringing the current affairs flagship of Norway’s public broadcaster (NRK) kicking and screaming into the internet age, told Journalism.co.uk.

He should know. Andersen is one of Scandinavia leading practitioners in mashing-up news and creating new and compelling methods for ‘doing journalism’.

Aside from being an able producer of interactive maps, he’s also an advocate for making programming an essential and commonplace skill in the newsroom.

Andersen started running online databases and mash-ups for a local newspaper in Norway creating – amongst others – interactive stories about snails reeking havoc across the regions gardens.

The principles may be the same but the subject matter has changed somewhat now he’s at NRK, where his most recent creation was a database mapping Norwegian politicians; how they vote, which boards they sit on and with whom.

“The idea is to make information about these networks more easily available,” Espen Andersen told Journalism.co.uk.

He has been brought in to help Brennpunkt, the Norwegian equivalent of Panorama, use online tools more effectively in both gathering and presenting information.

His Politikerdatabasen creation currently contains information on all members of parliament in Norway and will expand to include information on the country’s 11,000 local politicians in May.

“This project is just as much a journalistic project as making a TV-programme or a documentary. It’s all about presenting information that is valuable to the audience,” said Andersen.

The aim of the project, he added, is to turn the database into a broader ‘power database’ by mapping political and corporate networks across Norway.

This mapping project followed the creation for another recent Brennpunkt documentary of a network map of the country’s oil industry.

“I think it is absolutely key to bring programmers into the newsrooms so they can get involved in journalistic projects at an early stage.

“Programmers can create solutions to process large quantities of information, e.g. from public sources, and present it in an engaging and orderly manner,” Andersen said.

Before joining Brennpunkt, Andersen created several high-profile online databases and mash-ups for local newspaper Budstikka.

“I learned quite a bit about what kind of stories engage people when I worked at Budstikka: it is often issues that are very close to them. For instance, we made an online map where people could fill in their parking fines,” he said.

“Using databases we were able to summarise the fines to find which parking lots people were most annoyed with. It was a great success.”

Other projects that were big hits with the local community was an interactive map detailing which parts of the region were most troubled by snails killing off plants – a huge problem for passionate garden owners in the area (see main image), and an event map on Google maps. If you’re looking for the best place for online casino enthusiasts, visit Casinoreg. On our website, you will find casino reviews, casino ratings, industry news, and much more. Visit our site at https://casinoreg.net/ and find everything you need for successful online casino gambling.

The latter showed all events taking place in the area the newspaper served, and even garnered international attention.

image of Espen Andersen

“It’s typical of working for a local newspaper that you think you are working on a really big story on political budgets and trends, and you find people do not click on the story at all,” Andersen (above) said. And here you can find all the information about the most popular collection of friv games.

Information for the databases and maps, he added, are usually taken from publicly available listings, databases and other sources such as the tax lists, Company’s House, polling companies.

“However, it is a problem, especially for local newspapers, that public institutions often charge big fees for this information which has been gathered on behalf of the public, using the taxpayers money,” he said.

These few problems aside, he’s hopeful that in a few years programmers in the newsrooms will be as natural as having picture editors.

iPM: mapping the credit crunch

iPM is working with the CASA (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) – developer of a website for sharing maps – to use the technology more closely for journalistic ends.

Aside from this (and in a totally non-scientific way, they say) iPM wants to create a mood map of the credit crunch, assessing how people the length of the country feel about possible financial choppy waters ahead that it can use it to inform journalism.

Press Gazette: Telegraph developer weekend: The possibilites of Google Earth

Google’s Chewy Trewhella gave a presentation to the Telegraph developers day to show off the kind of things that can be done with the media giant’s Google Earth feature through developing mash-ups and apps that run in conjunction with the mapping technology.

Despite the possibilities open to developers through the service, Press Gazette says, he admits that Google have had problems keeping people interested in the technology.

Innovations in Journalism – live geo-tagged video broadcast from Seero

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today, live video streamed over the web with extra geographical information mapped in real-time from Seero.

image of seero’s website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
Hello, I’m Justin Cutillo, co-founder of Seero. It’s a geo-broadcasting platform that fuses live and on-demand video with GPS mapping.

Our technology is a response to the convergence and proliferation of video and GPS features in the flourishing mobile device market.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
Seero was built to reflect the core needs of video bloggers and online journalist. The platform incorporates tools for live mobile broadcasting with additional real-time GPS tracking and static location marking.

We also have a geo-information/advertising server. This system allows us to geo-tag specific information to enhance any broadcasts near that location.

For example, if an online journalist was covering a fire in London, we have the ability to upload facts specific to the building and geo-tag them to the exact location. The information is served based on its proximity to the location of the broadcast.

All you need for mobile broadcasting is a laptop and a mobile broadband card. You can add on an inexpensive GPS receiver for the real-time tracking feature or use an Ultra Mobile PC is you don’t want to carry around a full laptop.

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
We are currently working on some major build items. We should be releasing an embeddable flash player that includes the live video player and the full map functionality within a month. We are also working on a module to add course tracking to previously recorded videos.

Our largest project is to build a mobile broadcasting application for Symbian mobile phones to enable journalist to broadcast live video and GPS right from their Nokia phones.

Beyond that we have a secretive project that could really redefine how people interact with live video on the internet.

4) Why are you doing this?
When it comes down to it we are technology buffs. We came up with the idea on a vacation to San Francisco more than two years ago while thinking of ways to virtually tour a city.

Combining live video and location info opens up new, exciting uses for online video.  Needless to say we are very enthusiastic about the prospects.

5) What does it cost to use it?
Besides the hardware cost, which may be very little if you already have a laptop, the service is completely free to all users.

6) How will you make it pay?
We currently envision three main channels of revenue. The first channel involves white label sites built on the Seero infrastructure for promotional as well as professional and government services.

The second channel is geo-advertising. We have a proprietary geo-advertising system that provides a simple and powerful solution for correlating advertising to site content.

Beyond those revenue streams we also see potential for our geo-advertising system as a stand-alone service.

Telegraph adds local elections map

The Telegraph has created another political map of the UK, this time giving a regional breakdown of local politics.

The interactive map makes use of local council data, such as council tax figures, local services info and the political make up of the authority, which users can browse by area.

The paper says this is a long-term project and data on the map ‘will be enhanced and updated continuously’

Telegraph.co.uk map of local government election information

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YouTube videos now available in Google Maps

youtube videos on google maps

The team of developers responsible for Google Earth and Maps have launched a new feature to show Embedded YouTube videos in Google Maps.

Geotagged YouTube videos have been available in Google Earth since last year – the service has now been extended to Maps.

Newspapers in the UK have been increasingly drawn to the use of interactive maps on their websites as a new way of displaying news to their users.

In the US, where the availability of public data has made mapping a common part of online news reporting, several new innovative news-mapping experiments have recently launched.

In particular, new service Everyblock has been charting a vast range of public information across city maps for Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

The Google Maps developers have pointed out examples of how this new function might work for business – but the application being used for news videos looks like it could be just a step away.

Google to plot New York Times stories on Google Earth

image of ny times stories plotted on google earth

Some New York Times stories will be plotted geographically, in real time, on Google Earth.

“The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser. This is the first time we’ve endeavoured to show news updated in real time, and we’re very excited to work with this first-class publication to bring you the latest and greatest news,” claims the Lat Long Blog – written by the Google Earth and mapping teams.

The map allows users overlay a NYT news layer so that when they to fly around the earth, relevant news for the place they are hovering over appears.

This is just the latest iteration in a growing obsession by large news businesses to get their news mapped. It isn’t a million miles away from Metacarta’s Geosearch News – a site mapping over 14000 daily news stories across the globe.

That map lets users specify a place-of-interest and returns mapped search results presented in order of relevance – as determined by a combination of keywords and the specified location.

Telegraph creates mash-up map of London murders

Following news of the murder of 14-year-old Amro Elbadawi in London, the Telegraph has plotted figures of murders in the capital last year on a Google map to show their location and frequency by borough.

Screenshot of Telegraph map of London murders in 2007

The map gives an at-a-glance overview of the 26 teenagers murdered in London in 2007 and complements the text article, though it would be useful to have more of the information referred to in the piece included on the map – e.g. Metropolitan Police stats on the ethnic origin of last year’s victims.

The Manchester Evening News’ murder map of fatalities since 1999 develops the idea further with images of the victims and links to background articles.

Innovations in Journalism – Everyblock

We give developers the opportunity to tell us journalists why we should sit up and pay attention to the sites and devices they are working on. Today it’s aggregated news laid out across interactive city maps with Everyblock.

image of everyblock website

1) Who are you and what’s it all about?
I’m Adrian Holovaty. EveryBlock is an experiment in aggregating news at the block level in selected cities. Our site, which currently covers Chicago, New York City and San Francisco, allows you to view recent news for any address in the city.

We offer three broad types of news:

  • Public records, such as crimes, restaurant inspections, building permits, zoning changes
  • Links to news reports, such as newspaper articles and blog entries
  • Fun from the web, such as nearby Flickr photos or Craigslist ‘missed connection’ postings

The idea is that we collect all of this information from across the web (and directly from city governments themselves) and slice it geographically, so you can stay updated with what’s happening near you.

2) Why would this be useful to a journalist?
EveryBlock is useful to journalists in two ways.

First, it’s an experiment in a new form of news dissemination – that is, news filtered at the block level – and journalists can look to us for inspiration in new forms of publishing information. We’re funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation, whose goal it is to promote innovation in the journalism industry, and we’re a test-bed for this idea.

Second, we unearth a lot of government data that journalists might be interested in researching further. We only launched a few weeks ago, and already a few journalists have used our site to find trends and break stories on their own. This happens particularly because we make it so easy to browse government databases. Crypto casino bc game is one of the best. Here are two examples:

http://chicagoist.com/2008/03/05/trader_vics_is.php
http://cbs5.com/investigates/SF.hotel.safety.2.671667.html

3) Is this it, or is there more to come?
There is much, much more to come. As I mentioned above, we’ve only been around since late January. We plan to add more cities, more data and more features.

4) Why are you doing this?
This is an experiment. We’re doing it because it’s interesting, because it’s fun and because it’s an exciting new idea.

5) What does it cost to use it?
The service is entirely free. Unlike some newspaper sites, you don’t even have to submit an evil registration form!

6) How will you make it pay?
We have the luxury of not having to worry about that for a while. We’re funded by a grant for two years, and we’ve only been working on this project for about seven months at this point.

Times uses interactive poll for front-page splash

The Times has used the result of an interactive survey run on its website to create a front-page story about peoples spending habits, ahead of tomorrow’s budget.

Nearly 2500 people contributed to the survey, 400 of whom added comments about what most worried them most about their finances to an interactive map on the Times website.

image of times use of google maps

The map, a first use of Google Maps by the Times, was created with the assistance of UCLAN journalism course leader Andy Dickinson, using Google Forms and Yahoo Pipes.

“The Times has a long history of commissioning opinion polls,” wrote Tom Whitwell, Communities Editor, Times Online, about the origin of the survey.

“These are scientifically rigorous, using a carefully selected panel of maybe 1,000 people. At Times Online, we can do things very differently. We can throw out questions to our readers and capture their mood quickly, cheaply and easily.

“It doesn’t have the statistical rigour of an opinion poll, but it’s a snapshot of unfiltered opinion and anecdotal. In the United States, many newspaper have taken the process further, using “crowd-sourcing” to research and write major news stories.”