Geek to geek, face to face; We should do this more often
By William M. Hartnett on Aug 18, 2007 in CAR, featured
I gave a presentation Thursday to the Palm Beach Countywide GIS Forum on how we use GIS editorially at The Palm Beach Post. If you work with GIS in a newsroom and there is an organization of government GIS users in your area, find out more about it, ask if they’ll let you join and, if possible, try to give a little talk about what you do. There wouldn’t be much mapping in the media without the public-record data those folks produce, after all. Parcel maps, street centerlines, school locations … too much cool stuff to list.
It’s easy when you work with 1s and 0s all day to never get out of the office and meet the people receiving your mailed, faxed, phoned or e-mailed records requests. But data is a beat like any other, and it pays to spend time cultivating your sources.
