News Media today are evolving to include more geographic related information into a continuous news stream that is globally live. The origins of stories and breaking news events are being plugged into both professional and consumer oriented tools and technologies. A digital conduit strings together rapidly innovating tools, historical information with current happenings, whose ingredients are timeliness, awareness, wisdom, transparency and observation. The final result is news that is potentially more intelligent, more enriched, more useful and more likely to cause change.
News Media today are evolving to include more geographic related information into a continuous news stream that is globally live. The origins of stories and breaking news events are being plugged into both professional and consumer oriented tools and technologies. A digital conduit strings together rapidly innovating tools, historical information with current happenings, whose ingredients are timeliness, awareness, wisdom, transparency and observation. The final result is news that is potentially more intelligent, more enriched, more useful and more likely to cause change.
The news is evolving and changing. The reasons for this change include innovations in new technologies, data availability and more openness, a digital orientation that supports mapping, graphics and telecomunications connection. Along with each of these comes new awareness about how objects, circumstances and events around us can be structured, searched and represented.
We have moved past the time when placing a pin or marker on a map was the primary (and often only) means for using a map within a news report. While many web mapping efforts continue to places such pins, a shift is under way that integrates the power of search engines together with the geographic databases of information about places.
At the recent WhereCamp.EU event in Berlin, Yahoo for example, whose geoinformation group is based in Spain, spoke about new search engine efforts that would connect all of the places within pre-defined 1, 10 and 100 sq. km regions. For example, asking about a city building might present the architect, the nearest bus services, historical data related to that building and many events or places within the buffered square space. “How often have you said to someone, the building we will meet in is near the XYZ Coffee Shop?” Thus, demonstrating the power of such types of searches.
In a traditional sense, a news story gains greater accuracy based upon the number of sources a reporter has come across who can verify a story. However, vast threads of Twitter streams and Facebook pages contain huge quantities of peoples perceptions about places and events, often within certain locations, that can serve the same purpose.
Such analogies for the news can be drawn with static GPS sampling techniques. If one stands on any location and takes enough GPS location samples, regardless of the quality of the navigator, eventually the large number of samples will aggregate to an average that becomes very accurate and very precise – in other words the true place.
While mobile devices, telephones and other telecommunication technologies connect people in many places around the world today, the news is more oriented and interested in deciphering, aggregating and managing the vast quantities of perceptions, observations, strings of wisdom and valuable nodes of worthiness can have meaning.
What are the pieces of essential information coming from Twitter and other social media tools during a flood event? A tsunami event? A demonstration? How can they be verified, assessed qualitatively and quantitatively?
The emergence of both professional and consumer oriented social media tools and their cross-over points has much value for news media. Maps need to be accurate, they need to be representing situations properly. There are techniques for aggregating spatial information and cartographic techniques, for example, that best communicate results. How many news organisations have a cartographer on staff – few I would imagine…
Professional technologies are bringing together high quality data and information gathered from satellites, geomatics technologies involving surveying and other geospatial tools such as CAD systems to promote and stimulate the development of large-scale base maps, useful as the foundation for many of the world’s layered news stories.
Integrating personal stories, observations and events atop higher quality landscape geographics and mapping means higher quality and more accurate news. Consider the 3D ethics charter, an initiative that seeks to communicate and bring about the awareness and action that would result in 3D information being considered ethically, for example, no more trying to sell a house that looks good in 2D but sits next to a 300 m cliff when viewed in 3D.
Such examples describe the importance for digital news graphics to include ethics in their representations and news reporting. Do you think Fukushima would have been reported differently if viewed in 3D? Do you think Air France Flight 447 would have been described differently – or the sheer magnitude of the search under water, if viewed in 3D?
A growing number of people are slowly realising that they are awash in random bits of stories, news worthy events and strings of knowledge and wisdom that link independently. Being able to integrate and structure random strings of spatially enabled news bits is taking on a new importance. And, I would suggest, opening the door to new revelations and exposing new orientations for observing the importance of the continuous news strings.
Yet other organisations bring the power of geographic information analysis into the media news stream. They not only have the tools to aggregate and represent stories through the media, including social media, but they bring the tools of GIS and powers of geostatistics to these stories, to provide certainty and to assess risk in terms of their truth ( see here, here, here and here).
On the other hand, many tragic events give rise to personal observations that describe failing infrastructure, including failing bridges, buildings and the destruction of highways and other structures. The linkage of these infrastructures to original building information (BIM) and CAD design drawings can provide significant clues to the unfolding of events. When several people report “the bridge fell down or moved in the tornado from the left to right,” then tying their Twitter or other information to actual bridge designs and other digital information not only helps to represent it, but provides the essential and nearby step to begin re-visualizing such events.
In Europe we often find people reporting events and circumstances in terms of cultural orientations and often with a view to history. While we talk about the news stream today and modern tools, it is important to realise that the context of many of these observations find their origins in past events and circumstances. How do we get all of that paper based and non-digital value into the news stream?
On the other hand, even as people use basic web mapping today, they are often marking maps and making notations on the these digital surfaces – in a similar fashion to drawing on a map with personal details. As Gary Gale of Nokia indicated, “people are enriching the map, changing what it is and what it does.” That in reference to all the things people put on digital web maps through their mobile phones.
We are still at the earliest stages of integrating new tools into the news media. In part we have not figured out all the possibilities yet. In other ways the business models for offering news are changing as the tools for collecting and distributing news are changing. In other cases, news agencies are just starting to identify that they are licensors of value added information – provided that they undestand and appreciate the new roles and value of aggregated value-added products. Yet, all is not monetary. The walls of licensing are threatening openness and actually contributing to segregation and deterioration of news ‘data’.
In principle, the very techniques and approaches that geospatial personnel have pursued for improving the accuracy of geodata over the years, are similarly of importance to the delivery of high quality, informative and useful news.
There is much more to this than a pin on a map.
