Google Maps Engine: How do you put it to journalistic use? These Auburn Journalism students know

UPDATED WITH MORE MAP LINKS

The Multimedia Journalism students are finding out how useful and straightforward Google Maps Engine is as an online storytelling tool. Each created a map of five places on a subject relevant to the topics of their blogs.

The maps are an interactive version of an old standby of static print infographics: the locator map. Locators have a simple ingredients list: Headline, chatter, base map, place labels, and descriptions accompanying each place label. The difference with Google Maps Engine is that you get the gift of interactivity: Users can see pointer boxes with names and descriptions pop up as they hover the cursor over a list of place names.

The five-place Google Maps assignment is appropriate as an introductory exercise in interactive mapping for beginning multimedia journalists for these reasons:

• It challenges students to conceive of a piece they find interesting and (hopefully) that their readers will also find intriguing.
• It requires that they do the kind of research that will be expected of them in the newsrooms that will hire them after graduation.
• It gives them an opportunity to put to use what they learned in the step-by-step, in-class Google Maps tutorial, the Kansas City barbecue map. Hey, I’m a Kansas City boy, but some things translate well from the Midwest to the South, and barbecue is one of them. So we can almost all relate to the subject.

Here’s what the students cooked up this week:

• Top 5 Napa Valley Wineries: This was the brainchild of Ashtyne Cole, who keeps pretty busy between classes and work on the Intrigue desk at the Auburn Plainsman. Her blog: Off the Vine.
• Top 10 Favorite Formula One Circuits: By Reese Counts, proprietor of the Counts on Cars blog. You might recall his classmates picked his audio slideshow on a Triumph motorcycle repair shop in Auburn as their favorite.
• Top 5 Journalism Schools: Alex Derencz’s blog is all about Eagle Eye, Auburn University’s student television channel. Keep an eye on him, station managers and news directors. He’s a rising star and you’d be lucky to have him working for you.
• Top Five Best Home-cooking Restaurants in Auburn and Opelika: Becky Hardy’s blog is all about local food. I fear when she’s editor-in-chief at the Auburn Plainsman, she might have to order a lot of delivery rather than going to these fine venues. Good luck in your new role, Becky! You’re a hard worker and committed to community journalism, so I know you’re going to shine.
• International Food in Auburn: Lauren Klepac’s blog is called Culture Crazed, and it focuses on the cultural diversity of the Auburn University community.
• The Seven Wonders of the Northeast: Kate Seckinger’s War Damn Yankee blog addresses diversity of a different sort: cultural distinction between Northern transplants and Southerners from a distinctly New York point of view. Much as she embraces the Land of Cotton, he blog also includes sharing about the things she misses north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
• Top 5 Date Spots in Auburn: Mary-Kate Sherer also writes about local food on A Taste of the Plains, but it’s hard to have enough food coverage in a college town when everybody seems to want to write about Auburn football.
• Top 5 SEC Football Stadiums: Pierce Quinn picked the Southeastern Conference as his blog topic. While you’re on his blog, check out his five-shot sequence showing the fine art of passing a football.
• Civil Rights Movement Landmarks and Memorials in Montgomery: Megan Barkdull has devoted her Overcoming Ordinary blog to covering racial and ethnic diversity in Auburn and Alabama. This map inspired me to make a pilgrimage this weekend.
• Bama’s Five Best Breweries: Head on over to Jonathan Harrison’s Trending in Bama blog and you’ll find an appreciation of all things in the Yellowhammer State.

Google Maps Engine is not hard to use, once you understand what it does and how it works. The technical questions are not difficult; the challenge, as I discovered when I sat in on the international hackathon session at Auburn University’s computer science program last fall, is figuring out a journalistic use for it.

Coders provide the conduit, and it is powerful work that they do. Journalists provide the ideas for content to flow through the conduit. Technical thinkers and journalistic thinkers complement each other. Especially now, we need each other.

I’m proud of how much my Multimedia Journalism students have built their technical skillsets while flexing their storytelling muscles these last 16 weeks. May they evangelize new media thinking in the newsrooms they join in the near future. They’re smart, they love storytelling, and they’ve demonstrated a capacity for problem solving and tenacity. Editors , directors and station managers, you need these young people. Hire them!