GatheringPoint and Geofeedia help you find social media by location

Digital First journalists Cathy Hirko, Brittany Wilson and Buffy Andrews of the York Daily Record are doing some interesting work with tools that gather news content by its location.

Cathy used GatheringPoint to make maps of tweets, videos and other social media content relating to the removal of Joe Paterno’s statue and the NCAA sanctions against Penn State. Brittany made a similar map of social media content around the site of the Aurora theater attack (the map is embedded at the end of the story).

Cathy explained:

To help show readers what others were saying in social media at or near the scene of the shooting, we created a social media-based map — via GatheringPoint. The map highlights what others are saying via Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, just to name a few.

We forwarded the embed coding after creating the map and sent it out to the Denver Post and the Thunderdome team.

We are still in the testing phase for GatheringPoint, but it seems to be something readers like. For example, we created a map on Sunday highlighting social media near the Paterno statue. It quickly made it into the most viewed.

Also, many of the maps were embedded with other stories this weekend.

What’s great about these maps is that you create them and you are done. You socialize, of course, but you don’t have to babysit the map. It updates all by itself.

The York staff is testing GatheringPoint as a possible tool for use by other Digital First Media newsrooms. Cathy is pleased with the results so far:

We are working directly with the developers of GatheringPoint regarding feedback, tweaks to the site, etc. It’s still early on (we are only one week into creating our own maps).

So far, I really like the maps. They tend to work well with location-based breaking news.

Buffy is doing a lot of interesting work with Geofeedia, which feeds social media from a particular location into a site. Buffy blogged Tuesday about how to embed a continuous feed of social content into her blog. I mentioned Buffy’s use of Geofeedia in our coverage of the theater attack in Monday’s blog post. Buffy blogged in May about her work with Geofeedia.

I’ve blogged this year about using Twitter’s advanced search to find tweets by location and about how Andy Stettler uses Banjo to find tweets by location. Location information is growing increasingly helpful for journalists. If you’re not using it, you should start experimenting with some of these tools.

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