I started writing this post Monday, and in the meantime Adrian Holovaty’s Everyblock site launched, which is all about answering the “where” part of information.
It’s funny — I was talking with my coworker Doug today about how newspapers forgot to ask how the “Who / What / Why / Where / How” questions change when you’re publishing information online. In print you can be reasonably sure who your readers are. Online, not so much.
Anyway, so this post is about the “Where?” question, and three ways that online changes that question.
- Datelines mean less: Anybody from anywhere in the world could be reading you, and a reader from King, North Carolina, has little clue what it means for news to happen in Commerce City, Colorado.
- Context matters more: Nobody expects an essay on Commerce City’s history, people, and flora / fauna to accompany an article about news that happened there. However, that information would be useful, somewhere. In the article, no. But in a related page, perhaps of the wiki variety, yes. Why? Well, because I might be reading this article from King, North Carolina — or I might have just moved to Denver — and I might want to learn more.
- Maps are free: No longer does it take X amount of hours for a designer to whip out a locator map. With the right CMS, locator maps can be automatic. Why is this important? Once you start pinpointing the latitude and longitude of the news, you give your local audience the ability to find out what happened close to where they live not just by happenstance, but by technology.
Got any others?
And don’t forget about the increasing role of local search. With papers aggregating more and more information for their search products, there is no reason why that can’t be used to enhance stories. Neighborhood information, businesses and other categories could be pulled right from the search appliance.
True — now that readers are contributors as well, journalists aren’t the only ones who can ask and find answers to “Where?”