Using Google Maps in journalism
Posted on | January 29, 2009 |
I’m a big fan of Google maps in general, but it can be particularly useful when you’re trying to illustrate a story about a particular area. I experimented with it here, while writing a story about an alleged attack by the Russian government on Kyrgyzstan’s cyber infrastructure.
This wasn’t a blindingly impressive use of Google maps, but I was just test driving the idea. When logged into your Google account (you do have one, don’t you?) access Google maps and go to the area that you wish to show. Click on ‘my maps’, and create a new map. The extra buttons let you see the editing tools enabling you to create your map.
Check out their tutorial video on creating a Google map for a San Francisco walking tour:
Once the map has been drawn, you can make it public, and Google will then give you both a simple URL to link with, along with HTML that you can embed into your story. I prefer the latter, but as I said yesterday, it can be difficult sometimes to get publishers to do this — all depends on how HTML friendly your editors (or specifically, their IT guys) are.
You can start to see how useful this might be in illustrating your own stories by looking at maps like these:
- This blog took layoff data from Forbes and mapped it (but why didn’t Forbes do it first?)
- Spotcrime provides maps of crime in specific cities.
- Politicalbase.com mapped campaign contributions.
Instead of using maps to illustrate a single news story, the Seattle Times used it to pinpoint news around the world, and to enhance its local news by showing readers where the stories are. The WP used maps in an innovative way to cover the election.
A lot of these maps are more functional, and more customised, than your basic embedded map. Some will be using the Google Maps API to generate maps with searchable, dynamic data. That’s a lot more coding that a lot of freelance journalists will want to do (although I’m looking forward to digging into this - as Charles says, journalism and coding go together these days).
It’s easy to imagine more complex uses of Google maps for your own stories. I’m hoping to do something on the environmental impact of Uranium mining in northern Saskatchewan, for example. And a Google map might be the perfect way to illustrate the path of a product (how does that mango get to your door in the suburbs of Chicago? How many food miles are involved? How old is it by the time it reaches you?) Writing an article on the US nuclear weapons complex and how it’s still thriving? What about a Google map of the various installations around the country, from Livermore through Pantex to Savannah River?
Lifehack has an old but good set of Google Map links here.
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Word Herder is a site for writers and readers of both fiction and non-fiction. Surf here to read more about useful tools to help you organise your writing and optimise your research. I'm Danny Bradbury and I'm a freelance technology writer writing for the Guardian , the Financial Times, the National Post, Backbone magazine, MSN Canada, and the trade press. Here's a feed showing some of my work.
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