• Download the MP3 file
• My earlier post on the keynote

(Many thanks to Kevin Anderson for helping me overcome the perennial problem of trying to do interesting things on The Man’s Computer)

In the keynote, Gillmor said we need to think of new ways of telling stories online as journalism. One example he gives is an estate agents Google Maps mashup that plots properties that have been sold for less than their tax-assessment value. Gillmor asked why newspapers aren’t doing things like this, when it is clearly a journalistic story. I gave a similar example last week in the magazine column that this blog feeds into. I don’t always post the column-length versions here because they usually just expand on the blog posts, and this was no exception. But here’s what I wrote last week:

Mapping out stories is great local journalism. So why aren’t more people doing it?

… [Adrian] Holovaty announced that he will be leaving his job as editor of editorial innovations at WashingtonPost.com after collecting a $1.1m (£555,000) grant from the Knight Foundation News Challenge to begin a hyperlocal news startup called Everyblock. Holovaty’s organisation will create and release “open-source software that links databases [together] to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighbourhood or block”.

News organisations in Britain are generally leaving this sort of public-interest programming to entrepreneurial mashup-makers and the civic hackers such as those at MySociety.org. Consider, for example, PlanningAlerts.com, a mashup that scrapes planning application data from dozens of local councils’ websites, plots the locations onto a Google Map, and then sends email alerts to registered users in the area.

Systematically monitoring local planning applications and informing local residents about developments that affect them is bread and butter community journalism. Regional newspaper groups could be doing this for all the geographical data available from councils in their areas.

Still, there are stirrings in the right direction. Archant is planning to begin geocoding its stories when it relaunches its regional websites later this year. This is a crucial first step towards better use of spatial data.

Others are already experimenting on live sites. Christian Dunn, head of digital news at the Evening Leader in Wrexham, has been experimenting with plotting stories from the paper onto online maps using Platial.

Sky News, meanwhile, is adopting a new tool from Puffbox, a consultancy owned by former Sky web hand Simon Dickson, to allow its journalists to do similar things without specialist knowledge. The tool is being used for the first time this week as part of Sky’s Crime Uncovered special.

The tool, Dickson explains on his blog, makes it “a doddle for a non-geek journalist to throw a ‘flowing narrative’ mashup together in a matter of minutes.”

More of these new forms of journalism, please.

Tags: Blogs, Journalism, Mashups, Podcasting