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Salt Lake Tribune
The Salt Lake Tribune's earthquake map, featuring first-person community reports. |
Interactive maps are becoming one of the more popular and creative aspects of online news. Here are a two worth noting that I recently learned about:
Nevada Earthquake Map from the Salt Lake Tribune: On Feb. 21, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in the northwestern corner of Nevada was felt throughout the SLC region. Tribune Web producer Kim McDaniel explains how they jumped into action with this map: "We immediately put up an update story and solicited reports and photos from readers. As those started to come in, I repurposed a map we had built in MapBuilder, along with our admin pages and existing database from a holiday light display map we had done back in November. We relaunched it as an earthquake map, with a form for readers to submit where they were and what they felt, heard or saw during the quake.
"I also went through and added the accounts from our updated stories and those submitted via e-mail before we got the form up. We've also had several people post their stories on our comments thread on the main story as well."
Map My News from the Rocky Mountain News: This appears to be a new service powered by Yahoo that involves geotagging and mapping certain Rocky stories. (Today, only one is appearing on the map. Not sure what's going on there.) Also, some story pages (like this one) offer a sidebar newsmap feature, again from Yahoo. This service definitely has its bugs and rough edges, but it's worth watching. It could be valuable if it's done more consistently, and if the map content is made more intuitive and usable (not just repurposing print headlines).
