Making Customized Google Maps

Newspapers have been using Google Maps as one way to do alternative story telling. And now aspiring superjournalists can practice at home with geoXtract.

I found this program through a post in mediabistro or journerdism or something like that, but I have been playing around with it for about a week now, and it is kind of interesting. I just made a map of my spring break road trip, but it was a good way to get a feel for the program.

Basically you input in Excel Spreadsheet with the addresses you want to plot and any additional information that you want to pop up when someone scrolls over the marker on the map. The program uses this information to "geocode" the address, and--bata-bing, bata-boom--it spits out a Google Map at the end with your map points plotted on it.

Ok, it isn't actually that easy. It took me some fiddling to get my spread sheet into the right format that it could read, but it does make a pretty cool map.

The free version does not have a lot of features. For example, as far as I can tell you can only use one type of marker for all the points on the map, so you can't use a gas station marker and a restaurant marker for different locations.

Let me know if you try it out, and you figure out anything cool to do with it.

How does it pay to be a $uperjournalist?

PHOTO COURTESY OF: TRACY OLSON
An informal survey conducted by Will Sullivan of Journerdism in October 2007 examined the pay rates of online journalists. Sullivan’s survey produced 72 responses from online editors, directors and photographers/videographers in the U.S., and even in Asia, the United Kingdom and South America.

While I am generally not interested in the money aspect of my career, three years as a meager college student has opened up many adult realities, mostly involving the importance of a steady income. Moreover, I know we all desire to be successful and aspire to be someone important. There will most likely be times when we turn to our given salary as a convenient measure of our worth.

Sullivan believes online journalists earn a mode salary of about $45,000, about $3,000-$5,000 more in salary compared to those in print, all depending on the cost of living. That’s somewhat comforting, and may or may not be surprising for some of us.

What’s most interesting about Sullivan’s survey, however, is that online producers (those who program and design online multimedia) can often make $5,000-$15,000 less than online editors (those who oversee web teams and the market).

It seems the journalism industry (like all others, I suppose), is more about those in executive positions than it is about those who work just as hard, if not harder. The convergent online news industry is still evolving with more skills required of journalists, but their salaries don’t seem to be following along the same lines. In the case of Sullivan’s survey, salaries may prove to be an inadequate and quite arbitrary indicator of some journalists’ efforts.

That’s trifling. Online producers, who have skills in HTML/CSS, Flash, video, audio, photography, graphic design and everything else interactive, seem like they should earn more for their relatively rare skills. It certainly takes a lot more than “wearing a tie,” as Sullivan wrote, to do the things they do. (I have learned to appreciate really impressive interactive packages now, such as this one from The Dallas Morning News. How many of us can design and program something like that? I guess, in the future, maybe all of us).

Online editors no doubt have a demanding and important role in presenting news, and seriously, more power to them. But I hope that the Journerdism survey is somewhat misrepresented and that producers really do earn what they deserve for whatever skills they bring to their organization.

Does anyone currently know people in the industry who might be able to add more to this? What are your thoughts?

For those of us who will have some job in online news media, it shouldn’t matter how much you ultimately make, of course. Money isn’t as important to me as the creative value of the job itself. Still, Sullivan’s survey has taught me, at the very least, to find a job in the industry where we can be appreciated for what we can bring to the table (and quite frankly, our computer).

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