Barmann said that maps in particular are vital to election coverage. He pointed out that Lincoln Chafee, the independent candidate who won the governorship, actually won far fewer towns than his Republican opponent, John Robitaille. Chafee (represented by blue) won the more populous cities and the coastal towns, which tend to be wealthier, while Robitaille won the lower-income and more rural areas.
“Just by glancing at this map, you can see that, whereas, if you had a table or some charts it would be much harder to come to that conclusion,” said Barmann. “In this particular case, it’s just a wonderful way to tell a story.”
Darla Cameron of the St. Petersburg Times echoed that sentiment yesterday. “Yes, I think if you can look at something like this geographically, you might as well,” she said, and then laughed. “Although, that might not be the most astute thing to say. I’m pretty tired right now.”
*[Update: This sentence previously made reference to some reassignments of the newspaper’s graphic arts staff; however, these are irrelevant to Barmann’s work on this project. The reference has been removed, and the sentence has been altered to be more clear.
Great article, but you don't need to know GIS to make great maps to display election or other data. A good place to start is by searching wikimedia for maps. You can get open source SVG maps at the country, state, and county level. SVG maps are really easy to edit with a vector graphics program like Inkscape.
If you want to make your maps interactive, you really need to learn some Flash. However, there are many commercial out-of-the-box solutions that allow you to customize Flash maps by editing a text XML file. If you are interested, II write about interactive maps on my flash mapblog.
#1 Posted by Chris, CJR on Fri 5 Nov 2010 at 01:52 AM
Thanks, Chris. Your site has a lot of helpful info. I should have also linked to two pieces I wrote about embeddable maps Google put out for the election. Google is only one place to start, of course; there's a lot of really great free & easy software out there for news sites that want it.
#2 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Fri 5 Nov 2010 at 01:30 PM
As a former employee of the wonderful St. Petersburg Times, I don't think it's fair that you insinuate that they are, as it says in the headline and article, a smaller-circulation paper. That's false. They're the largest paper in the state with 239,000 subscribers. Source: . And I'm willing to bet they have one of the largest newsrooms in the state, too.
Furthermore, the Dallas Morning News is also not what one would consider smaller sized, with it's 264,000 circulation. Source: Click here. Again, I don't think that's "small."
And lastly, the San Jose Mercury News is ALSO not a smaller-circulation newspaper, with 477,000 subscribers. Source: Click here. Yes, I know their paper's circulation figures are a mix of three papers, but I wouldn't hardly call them small, even if you were counting just the News.
The News Journal and the ProJo sound like the only two "smaller-circulation" papers included in this blog post. They all did some awesome work, and it's nice that you pointed it out. But I don't think it's fair to lump large papers all in a post about smaller circulation papers. It's factually incorrect.
#3 Posted by Andy Boyle, CJR on Fri 5 Nov 2010 at 02:38 PM
Hi Andy, thanks for the comment. You're right, those papers you mention aren't necessarily "small" - but they are small-er than the papers whose interactive projects I reviewed in my previous post on the same topic (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, etc.) That's why I linked to the wiki list of papers by circulation, to show the relative size of all of the papers I mentioned. But in fact, perhaps I should have been clearer, and referred to the smaller newsrooms (rather than smaller circulation figures) of these newspapers. The point of this piece, and I hope it came across, was that there is wonderful work being done in newsrooms that don't have, say, the 30+ full-time interactive staff of the NYT. For instance, I spoke with your colleague Darla Cameron, who told me that the Times newsroom has dozens of reporters, but she was still the only hand on deck for interactive online graphics on election night. My intent was to celebrate, rather than denigrate, the effort made by programmer-reporters like her.
#4 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Fri 5 Nov 2010 at 03:19 PM
Yeah, but to be fair, there are really only a handful of papers that have the capacity to do the work the NYTimes and the WSJ do. So, if you're using those papers as the median, of course the St. Pete Times is going to seem smaller. (And, in full disclosure, I'm a digital developer for a subsidiary of The New York Times Co.)
I thought it was a nice piece highlighting some cool work. I just think the premise that some of these organizations are "smaller" because they're being compared to the biggest papers in our country is a bit much. That's all.
#5 Posted by Andy Boyle, CJR on Fri 5 Nov 2010 at 03:36 PM
Andy, yep, I understand what you're saying. I think you took the word "smaller" as a value judgment on my part. Smaller isn't bad, it's just different, of course. The New York Times has a certain set of resources, and so makes certain decisions: same for the St. Petersburg Times. I could have said "average-size" or something, I suppose. If I hadn't just written a piece on the NYT and WSJ (who both have unusually large interactive graphics teams) two days before I probably wouldn't have used the word "smaller" at all. Thanks for the feedback, in any case.
#6 Posted by Lauren Kirchner, CJR on Fri 5 Nov 2010 at 03:43 PM
I'm sorry, but this is going to hurt, and I don't want to sound like a hater. It's sad that these "interactive graphics" are acceptable, even impressive, to some in this industry. If we had any ability to attract talent in this industry we'd see just how mediocre these really are. I work at a 60,000 circ paper, so I can see why you're impressed (we don't have the staff to produce cool stuff anymore, not that we ever did). But because my focus is online, and I haven't been locked in the closet of the news business for my entire life, I just see this kind of stuff and shake my head. There's very little creativity here. And most of these tools evidently didn't get tested for usability. There's nothing new. Nothing that jumps off the screen and makes me say "Wow, a newspaper did that?" It's really just a bunch of maps you can click on and get results. I would imagine the user traffic to these tools didn't impress their creators.
#7 Posted by Mirv, CJR on Mon 8 Nov 2010 at 04:11 PM