The Modern Journalist

There is Crime in Them There Parts

We’ve been having a discussion about crime and reporting at The Modern Journalist NING social network, which got me thinking about the best ways to cover this in a modern newspaper.

The Cincinnati Enquirer, my hometown paper, has a cluster of information smashed on a map at the Cincy Navigator, an interesting — but unfinished — product.

And that database-map schema seems to be the prevailing winds for much of what I’ve found online.

There are two issues as I see it:

1. The information is just thrown onto the map with no real way to parse out information other than zooming in and out (which does alleviate some of the headache)
2. The information is out of context in terms of what the data means

The second part is more concerning for newspapers, though, because this is the area that should be easiest for them to excel.

This kind of reporting can — and likely will be — done by outside enterprises if local papers don’t start working to get this in place. Just a quick search pulled up Crime Reports, a national — but also incomplete — listing of crimes. Their goal is to provide law enforcement agencies with the most comprehensive database of crimes online.

While my friend Chris brought up that it would be exceedingly difficult for a national organization to gather local crime reports, ultimately, the site’s stated goal is to work with law enforcement agencies — not Wall Street.

If the tool set is provided, local organizations — not all, but many I suspect — will have an incentive to be involved.

This is a squishy affair for me because my gut says that local papers — if they conceive of what an actual database should look like — would always have the advantage over national organizations; however, national organizations with ONE stated goal can overcome their distance by finding ways to fund their organization long term through grants and government funding while also building the most comprehensive and user-friendly (re: ad free) navigation system.

Does that spell doom for local papers?

Not at all. Particularly if they begin to build larger, contextual databases that track population, economics, politics and arts together in ways that allow their reporters — and their citizens — to create and build stories around that information.

And not if they use the Google tools I’ve been discussing to add and geo-locate information that is contextual specific to the neighborhoods and all of that.

Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a plan for that information — or, there doesn’t seem to be an easily identifiable plan based on the local graphical databases that I’ve seen.

I’m sure there are folks working on cool projects, but right now, they seem to be stop-gap measures.