Comments on: Cincinnati.com’s Navigator amps up stats

By: Amanda E.

Amanda E. — Mon, 12 May 2008 19:24:22 +0000

@Rick

Killing a web project that would be interesting to visitors since it will paint a neighborhood in bad light.

Nice, very nice.

But than again, it might show neighborhoods that are “considered to be safe” are actually not. Can’t let that bit of info out, it might frighten your viewers, sorry your advertisers that live in those neighborhoods [end sarcasm]

Gee for example, there’s a neighborhood in Spokane where three broadcast stations reside and on the surface it appears to be a nice, safe middle-to upper middle class neighborhood.

The amount of petty crime I saw happen when I worked in that area was absolutely amazing in contrast to the superficial appearance of the area - daily smash and grabs in parking lots, including the place I worked at and numerous attempted burglaries (one day in fact came to work to find the engineer and building maintenance trying to figure out how to reattach the knob to the back door after someone overnight got defeated by the mag-locks and broke off the knob - though if they got in via that door, they wouldn’t have gotten past the tape library).

Now of course one can’t map and show that the South Hill is not any better than West Central or Hillyard…and I can’t picture any of the local media outlets even attempting to. SPD has one, but its a half-assed job of course that is hard to navigate even for a web geek.

By: Rick Ellis

Rick Ellis — Mon, 12 May 2008 07:44:46 +0000

When I saw this, all I could think of was a conversation I had with News Director on my station back when I was the ME of their web site.

This was maybe three years ago, and the city was in the midst of a violent crime wave, including homicides. I was pushing to use the data to create a Google map readers could use to track trends and drill down to individual crimes for more info.

The project died when he argued that showing precisely where murders were concentrated would put some neighborhoods in a bad light and that would be “bad buisiness.”

I would like to say that he paid a price for his short-sided theories, but I think he’s been promoted twice since then…

By: Liz Foreman

Liz Foreman — Mon, 12 May 2008 05:19:43 +0000

I nearly forgot…A hearty thanks for reading LR and Cincinnati.Com!

By: Liz Foreman

Liz Foreman — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:10:57 +0000

hey mark, as a cincinnati.com-er (though this isn’t my project,) i wanted to say that we understand your request. in fact, the team who created navigator has just done some back-end refining to make this type of thing (embedding) possible.

By: Mark Mascolino

Mark Mascolino — Mon, 12 May 2008 04:01:17 +0000

As a Cincy resident I’ve seen this and used it but they really need to go one step further. In news stories, they need to supply a link into the tool that centers it around the crux of the story at hand (crime, fires, accidents, etc.). Right now, they only supply a link to the tool which is irritating.

It is however an interesting way of getting at the why of news or the trends. After all in a metro area of 2 million plus people, individual robberies and the like aren’t really interesting to everyone but if you can spot trends and provide analysis then that is useful to a lot of people.