Breaking news graphics: A comparison of fire maps
Xaquin Gonzalez Veira compared online news organizations’ maps of the California fires last week. Gonzalez, the assistant art director at Newsweek who is responsible for the magazine’s online interactive graphics, writes his blog in Spanish, so I have taken the liberty of translating and paraphrasing his post: California en llamas (California in flames).
Gonzalez had experience with massive fires like these from last year, when he was still at El Mundo, the Spanish newspaper known as one of the great powerhouses of news graphics. “Almost a million people evacuated and about 1,000 square kilometers burned,” he wrote, with a link to Galicia en llamas from elmundo.es.
On Monday [Oct. 22], all the online mapping tools relative to the fires were either down or functioning horribly badly. I waited to download some data at night …
With the 2006 Galicia graphic in mind, Gonzalez knew the sources to go to and had a clear idea, more or less from the beginning, of how to structure the graphic.
The resulting online graphic uses satellite photos, population density, photos of the fires on the ground, and an interactive calculator to show the distance from one fire to another, or the distance from Los Angeles (this is very cool — look for it in the upper right corner of the map).
Indeed, unprecedented for a weekly — Newsweek, we posted it a few hours before the NYT: those who truly appreciate the work of Steve Duenes’s team know that feeling.
Gonzalez praised The New York Times’s fire graphic — “as always, excellent” — which shows the extent of the fires and their evolution over seven days, with the ability to zoom in on individual fires.
As I found out at the ONA conference in Toronto, I am not the only one who says, “I hate them,” when they publish some jewel.
MSNBC.com used a map from Microsoft Virtual Earth. Rollover boxes provide a lot of detail about each fire, some with photos.
The Los Angeles Times used Google Maps for one of its many maps (some are static; others use the slideshow template).
USA Today points to the USDA Forest Service map, Gonazalez wrote — I liked their own map very much, and I think it might be the most complete coverage of the story, if not the most detailed (perhaps).
Ay! The APIs: “However good and bad, they still had to be done,” or, “How easy it is to use Google Maps …”
I appreciate Gonzalez lifting the curtain and giving us a glimpse inside his world.
Leave a Reply