Anyone who’s worked in local TV news knows that tracking a fire’s progress on a map is a very difficult proposition. First, fires are fickle. Second, the information is usually not readily available. Now multiply this by a bunch of fires with massive evacuations and 24/7 live coverage, and maintaining accurate fire maps is extremely difficult.
But San Diego is a great case study: how maps can be more important than live aerials, and how the web can help. Here’s what one person had to say about the TV coverage there: “My home may be on fire. I cannot get through on 211 (fire information line). After trying several websites, not one of them would load…. I resorted to calling the newsroom of EACH TV outlet. I pleaded with them to put up a map. I saw a freeway map depicting little flames at several points…. I explained that while talking heads in front of ferocious flames made for great television, what the public needed was INFORMATION…. Where were the maps? Please tell me that you didn’t unload $750,000 for a graphics system that can’t do maps!… Finally, after two or three days, we saw newsreaders holding up Thomas Brothers guides, and pointing with their fingers to affected areas.”
In this story, maps are more important than live chopper aerials. The scale of the fires was simply too extreme for chopper aerials to provide meaningful information. But all the stations went out of their way to pool chopper resources. One San Diego resident suggests that TV stations pool their map resources. “Create a ‘war room’ with MAPS. Keep the maps up-to-date as you can: active fire lines, firefighting unit deployment, evacuation areas, wind directions and speeds. SHOW THE MAPS.”
What a great idea. The LA Times and KPBS did just that online by creating Google Maps that could be distributed anywhere. (Google even highlighted both of them on its main Maps page.) Pooling this is easy since you could have multiple contributors coordinating updates on a single Google map. Then you display the map live, on the air, zooming from fire to fire, street to street. (Google has TV licensing agreements, but I’m sure in this case Google wouldn’t have minded if San Diego stations put them on the air without an agreement.) Here at KING, we have a deal to use Microsoft’s Live Maps on our air.
In short, maps and the visual depiction of data on TV is a critical component of breaking news coverage, and it’s best organized if the same mapping can be ported to the web and updated automatically. Many times, it’s even more important than good video.