Using Maps West Virginia Uncovered Training Session February 2009 Jessica Rhodes

Using maps for news stories  There are many different reasons to incorporate maps into your stories  To give reverence to a place  To help reader understand the location of a person or place  To show the relationship in distance from place to another  Example of a story where you could use a map:  Perhaps you are covering a bank robbery  You could use a map to show where the bank is located and where the robber was caught by police.  There are many different reasons to incorporate maps into your stories  To give reverence to a place  To help reader understand the location of a person or place  To show the relationship in distance from place to another  Example of a story where you could use a map:  Perhaps you are covering a bank robbery  You could use a map to show where the bank is located and where the robber was caught by police.

Here are a few examples of news story maps This map was a supplement to a story about West Virginia University School of Journalism students’ summer trip to Southeast Asia. The map was used to show the locations the student’s visited and add an interesting fact or memory of the place.

This map was created to show the distribution of School of Journalism students after graduation

A map used in the Oregonian

The same map taken from their Web site

A map used to show a car chase

The same map as it appeared on the newspaper’s Web site

A map/infographic used to show the area of the World Trade Center and Ground Zero

The following three maps are representing a tsunami near India

Incorporating Google Maps into your site

Google Maps  Google provides a free service for Web sites to add their map service to their page.  All you need is a Google account and you can add Google Maps to your very own site  West Virginia Uncovered uses Google Maps to pinpoint their story locations with brief paragraphs about the story  Google provides a free service for Web sites to add their map service to their page.  All you need is a Google account and you can add Google Maps to your very own site  West Virginia Uncovered uses Google Maps to pinpoint their story locations with brief paragraphs about the story

Visit this site to learn more about adding Google maps into your online site