To the New York Post - Use the Map...Don't Hide it!

Thanks to a reader, I was informed that the New York Post is using MetaCarta's NewsMap. Great, I thought...another convert to using interactive mapping for local news reporting. But the Post has buried the NewsMap on the NYPD Blotter page. So, they make a fairly big deal of covering local New York news from the five boroughs but don't index every section with the NewsMaps technology. To be fair, the page on which the map is placed indicates that the NewsMap is in "beta" but the Post will never get feedback on whether readers appreciate the technology.

There's not much "news" on the map and links from the "news tips" (clicking on one of the triangles indicating a news item) may bring you to a page that has a larger map window but not much additional news.

So, my advice to the Post is to make this a little more robust even before you launch this in beta because it is just not that informative and rarely indexes news of interest. I'd advise MetaCarta to work with the Post to get this into a form that truly exposes local content.

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