I have two interactive map ideas to share: one that’s timely this week and one that I tossed out in conversation with some arts journalists Saturday:
Friday is Veterans Day. We got some pretty good engagement last year at TBD with our #wheretheyserved map (below), created by Daniel Victor.
Whether you are planning the obligatory feature story about local veterans or not, I encourage newsrooms to engage this week with your communities this way by inviting people to tell their stories. You can invite people to place pins on the maps for their family members who are serving or have served in the military. They can tell stories and add photos and links, even videos.
We promoted it on Twitter using the #wheretheyserved hashtag (you might want to try a local or state hashtag such as #CTvets for Connecticut vets or #MIvets for Michigan vets). Some people may just tweet using the hashtag and not enter the information on the map. You can enter it for them (or reply or DM, encouraging them to do that themselves). Of course, you’ll want to promote it as well on Facebook (not just on your own page, but check to see if local veterans groups have Facebook pages) and in print or broadcast products.
You could adapt this idea to other holidays: Where people spent their favorite Christmas, favorite holiday lighting displays, favorite vacation stories, etc.
Making a Google map is easy. Go to Google Maps, click on “my places” and then “create map.” Click “collaborate” and allow anyone to edit the map (you will want to watch in case anyone tries any mischief, but we didn’t have any problems with this at TBD). To embed the map on your site, click the link icon in the upper right corner (the window this opens will also give you an opportunity to customize the appearance of the map).
In a Skype conversation Saturday with some arts journalists, I mentioned an interactive map possibility that might work for them: Invite people to place public art such as murals, statues and outdoor sculptures on a map of your community. People can add photos of the art works, as well as their own mini reviews or a story about the piece. The compilation of such a map can be a fun weeklong or monthlong engagement project. And then the map is an evergreen community resource for your site.
Crowdmap is another tool to use for community engagement. My former TBD colleague Mandy Jenkins wrote a how-to explainer for creating a Crowdmap on her blog.
What are some other ways newsrooms can engage the community in building a map? Please share some examples if you have engaged the community in making a map (or have seen a map someone else used).
The Buttry Diary 
I really liked the NY Times map for 9/11, where you could pinpoint where you were when the attacks happened: http://nyti.ms/uuz2M2
LikeLike
Excellent example. Thanks, David!
LikeLike
Thanks to Bill Doskoch, who pointed out (on Google+) this OpenFile map of Toronto’s war dead from World War II.
LikeLike
Good morning, Steve. I love your ideas. Thanks for sharing. Here’s one that the we do and it’s awesome for community engagement.
We ask people to share photos of them with the York Daily Record/Sunday News on vacation. York County residents have taken the newspaper everywhere from the Grand Canyon to Cairo to Bangkok.
We created an interactive map showing all of these places. Readers can click the pins on the map to see where their neighbors have visited. When you click on the pin, a photo pops along with information the reader submitted.
We also publish the photos in print (on our travel page, which gives us great local content) and give a $25 gift certificate each month in a random drawing. Everyone who submitted that month is entered into the drawing. It’s a very popular feature and we get tons of photos. Here’s the link to check out: http://www.ydr.com/ci_17292990
Also, another feature we do that is great for community engagement, although it is not with maps, is our Remember series.
From a recent post that explains it: I can still remember the day I proposed the Remember series to my staff. I wanted to capture readers’ memories of days gone by, whether it was World War II or sock hops or the milkman. I knew that as the population aged, we were losing our chance to capture these oral histories. I wanted to create an online repository so that these memories would live forever, to be accessed not only by our readers but also by teachers and students who might find them useful.
My awesome staff threw their support behind the project. We decided to set up a phone line to capture the oral histories. We also decided that we would choose one person to feature in a video (we couldn’t possibly do them all).
It’s been a few years since that staff meeting, and I’m enormously proud of what we have accomplished. We have done nearly 40 Remember stories and you have played a vital role in the series’ success. Without our loyal readers, there would be no series. Thank you for taking the time to share your memories. When you participate, you make our stories better, not just for us but for generations to come.
Here is that link: http://www.ydr.com/remember
Again, thanks for sharing and I’m sorry that this post is so long, but I think that both of these are worth mentioning.
LikeLike
[…] use Joey Kulkin of the Trentonian made of Google+ in its first weeks of availability. I wrote about Google maps, Visual.ly and Foursquare. I plan to blog regularly about digital tools in […]
LikeLike
[…] telling stories. We can and should tell our stories with photos, videos, audio, animation, games, maps, databases, timelines, data visualization and interactive graphics (and probably some tools I […]
LikeLike