Online Journalism News

New site plots news stories to locations

Italian citizen journalism advocates have produced a website that meshes news stories with Google Maps. GeoNews harnesses the Google News aggregator to plot news stories on a world map as they are published.

"Icons are proportional to the importance of the news and are resized with the zoom of the map," according to a press release issued by the Milan-based We Reporters website behind the project.

"The news stories are provided in real time by Google News services from the US, UK, Canada, India, Australia and New Zealand. [They] are displayed on Google Maps and the articles are located on the geographic location where the event occurred or, when this is not available, on the IP location of the publisher's server."

GeoNews appears to rely on stories that include a place name in their dateline, a practice most common to agency reports.

When tested this week, however, the service plotted stories about a Caribbean tropical storm to the south Wales town of Neath.

More news from journalism.co.uk:
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google | australia | india | united kingdom | united states | new zealand | canada | online publishers | wales | caribbean | milan | real time | tropical storm |

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