(Rich Gordon)

Location, location, location.

It's not just the best advice for investing in real estate - it's an important emerging frontier for media content and services. A frontier that newspapers and other local media ignore at their peril.

When it comes to location, three important trends are converging:

• Web-based mapping technologies are becoming simpler and, consequently, ubiquitous. The "My Maps" function of Google Maps makes it easy for anyone to display information on a map - and Google has also made it amazingly simple to embed a map in any Web page. Beyond that, thanks to open-source mapping tools, Web developers (like those at EveryBlock) can now create their own map interfaces that have functionality and design features not allowed by Google.


• Mobile phones are getting smarter and are gaining "location awareness." The first-generation iPhone does a remarkable job of identifying its owner's location by reading nearby WiFi signals and checking them against a database of wireless hotspots. The new iPhone 3G, due for release this month, will be even better because it will actually communicate with GPS satellites. And credible research suggests that within a few years, GPS will be included on most cellphones and other portable devices.


• The market for vehicle-based navigation systems is growing fast. ABI Research projects that systems like OnStar and the newer SYNC system will soon be standard equipment on new cars. New navigation systems won't just tell you where you are and how to get where you're going. Already, users of XM satellite radio can get real-time traffic alerts on their in-dash GPS systems - an early indication that geographically relevant content can be delivered to automobiles as well as phones.

Here at Northwestern University, I recently had the pleasure of overseeing "Team LoJo," a class of six journalism master's students who set out to explore "locative journalism" in Medill's New Media Publishing Project. The team came up with this definition of locative journalism:

Using location-based technologies, such as GPS-enabled mobile devices and interactive maps, to provide geographically-relevant content that enhances a participant’s connection to a given place.

Team LoJo reported a series of multimedia stories about Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics, and experimented with different ways of presenting those stories - via online slideshows, Web-based maps and location-aware portable devices. They documented their research and reporting on a blog (lojoconnect.com), created several multimedia stories and produced a comprehensive report (downloadable PDF) with findings and recommendations for journalists, newsrooms, media companies and journalism schools. For today, I want to focus on two of their most interesting recommendations:

1. News organizations should geotag their content


2. Harness the power of audio

The importance of geotagging

A dozen years ago or so, when most news organizations began publishing on the World Wide Web, almost all of them made the same mistake. They assumed that the Web was a text-based medium, and shoveled (hence the term "shovelware") their text content online with no change except to add HTML coding. We've since learned that adding structure to the text content - whether coding pages consistently so they can be found by search engines, or putting classified ads into a searchable database - is critical to making online content accessible and useful.

Today, news media are making the same mistake with geography, which is - after all - an extraordinarily powerful way of making content relevant. For decades, consumers have told us that "local" is the most relevant category of news. While people define "local" differently in different situations, I'm confident that organizing content by geography can make it more relevant to more people.

Local news organizations are trying to capitalize on geography by building new "hyperlocal" Web sites to serve neighborhoods, cities and towns. It makes sense to do so. But the problem with a hyperlocal Web site is that people have to go to the site to see the content. Our students concluded that geographically relevant content will reach more people if it is geotagged - meaning that the content is marked up so it can be displayed on maps, on Web sites organized by geography and on location-aware portable devices.

As with the PC-based Web, content that's appropriately formatted will end up being displayed and distributed in ways that the original creator didn't anticipate. For instance, the New York Times now routinely includes an XHTML meta tag on its articles that identifies the geographic locations the story focuses on. For instance, consider this article about bus riders in the Bronx. In the header of the Web page, this code is included:

<meta name="geo" content="Bronx (NYC);Manhattan (NYC);Inwood (NYC)">

From a programming standpoint, what the Times does is simple (though it's important to note that some human being has to categorize each article by geography). Because of this small step, some Google developers were able to make it possible to browse New York Times articles through the Google Earth interface.

I'd like to say that there is a commonly accepted format for how to tag content geographically, but as far as I can tell, no such standard yet exists. The Times certainly could be doing more - for instance, including true GPS latitude/longitude coordinates when relevant. But at least the Times has put a simple system in place that ensures its content can at least be sorted and aggregated by municipality. It may not be enough, but it's something every news site should be doing.


Why it's time to reprioritize audio

Radio is the second-oldest of the "traditional media," but it hasn't been an important local news medium for a very long time. (I love NPR as much as anyone, but its wonderful content is mostly national and global.) But as the Project for Excellence in Journalism puts it, "What we once knew as radio is now something more complex and in many ways more interesting. In addition to the AM and FM dials, now there is satellite, HD, Internet, MP3s, podcasting, and increasingly, cell phones."

I wish I had a dollar for every person I've heard talk about the potential significance of cellphones as media delivery systems. But referring to phones, most people talk about "screens" - as in "the third screen" or "the small screen." The assumption - which seems to be driving the content strategies of the cellular carriers - is that people want to watch video on their phones.

Our students came to a different conclusion. First, they participated in a variety of audio tours, which have proliferated far beyond their original uses in museums and no longer require proprietary hardware thanks to the popularity of portable music players. Audio tours are available now from private companies, nonprofit groups, and news organizations. The students found that the best audio tours could be powerful, immersive storytelling experiences.

Our student team also experimented with locative stortyelling on GPS-enabled portable devices, using free Windows Mobile software from Hewlett-Packard. On a sunny Saturday morning in May, they invited people to come to Washington Park in Chicago - the proposed home for Chicago's Olympic stadium - to experience "locative journalism" for themselves. The students came away convinced of the potential power of stories rooted in a physical location, but they also found that when people are paying attention to their surroundings, photos (and video) are a distraction while audio is complementary.

The kind of story our students created - which required people to walk around a newsworthy location - may never be extraordinarily popular. But the students' work underscored two larger points. First, that content can be more relevant when cued by the user's geographic location. And second, that users of portable electronic devices often are not likely to want photos or video content. These devices are portable, and people using them are often in motion (think of all those people you see on the street with earbuds sprouting from their heads) or multitasking. Considering both points, I have been wondering if a new golden age of audio might be coming soon.


Other perspectives

Whether or not I'm right about the growing potential for geographically triggered audio stories, I'm confident that geotagged content and mobile devices will create new opportunities - and threats - for local media. Newspapers, especially, should be best positioned to create content tied to geography (not to mention location-based advertising) - but they can be bypassed just as they have been on the Web. It's time for local media companies to start focusing on locative content and the future of mobile devices. Here are some places to start exploring:

• Al Ries, a marketing consultant and author who writes frequently for Advertising Age, recently posted a video entitled "Birth of a medium," in which he predicts that location-enabled cellular phones will become a new mass medium.


• This post from probably my favorite blog these days, Read/Write Web, describes 10 startup companies focused on making social networks mobile.


• The Center for Locative Media is a good resource, especially its blog and the posts by its director, Leslie Rule, on the PBS Idealab site.


• A group of journalism bloggers recently weighed in with answers to this question: "Is (digital) journalism better the more local it is?"


• If you're interested in geographically tagged news and information, of course you should check out EveryBlock and its blog. If you're not impressed right away, keep checking back - Adrian Holovaty and his team keep adding cool content and new features.


• Lance Ulanoff, editor of PC Magazine, recently wrote a column entitled, "Good-Bye Desktop PC, Hello iPhone" in which he predicts that young people will one day make fun of older generations "who sat down at desks and worked on 20-pound boxes."


• Wired magazine recently offered a fascinating article about Google's project to build an open operating system for mobile phones - which could dramatically expand the possibilities for mobile content while weakening the mobile carriers.


• Two valuable blogs are mocoNews, Rafat Ali's news service covering mobile content, and All Points Blog, "The Weblog for Location Technology & GIS."

By Rich Gordon (richgor-at-northwestern.edu)
Rich Gordon is Associate Professor and Director of Digital Technology in Education at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.