Geotagging: Pew research shows why news orgs should do a better job with it

September 06, 2011

Geotagging: Pew research shows why news orgs should do a better job with it

“Where” is crucial context for mobile media—and for news. New research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project indicates that a significant and growing portion of U.S. cell phone users are using the built-in GPS to take better advantage of mobile services and content…

According to Pew:

“28% of cell owners use phones to get directions or recommendations based on their current location. That works out to 23% of all adults.” (This includes 55% of smartphone owners.)
“A much smaller number (5% of cell owners, equaling 4% of all adults) use their phones to check in to locations using geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla.” (12% of smartphone owners do this.)
“9% of internet users set up social media services such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn so that their location is automatically included in their posts on those services. That works out to 7% of all adults.”

Continuing a trend revealed in their earlier mobile research, Pew found that Latinos are leading in U.S. adoption of location-based services. Specifically, while only 7% of U.S. white smartphone users use geosocial services such as Foursquare or Gowalla, 25% of Latinos and 17% of blacks who own smartphones do so.

Bucking this trend, white smartphone owners are in the lead (59%) in terms of getting location-based directions and recommendations—followed by 53% of blacks and 44% of Latinos.

Is your CMS geodata-friendly? So far, most news organizations have done little to upgrade their content management system to systematically and consistently geotag every piece of content—either with a latitude/longitude point, or by a polygon defined by a set of such points.

Offering this kind of geodata is the key to integrating your content with popular geo services, from mapping to Yelp to social media and more—and even to search, which is increasingly personalized based on location and other user-specific context.

Mentioning place names as text in a dateline, headline, category/tag, or story body generally is not sufficient for locative services to integrate your content.

So now is the time to make your CMS geodata-friendly, and to train all your editorial and production staff in how to correctly geotag every piece of content you publish. This upgrade will position you to more easily capitalize on opportunities offered by whatever location-augmented services exist now and in the future.

Reporters, editors, and ad staff should be using locative media. This will help you understand opportunities to integrate content into locative services, identify potential partners and prospects, and more. It’s also a great tool for finding or fleshing out stories.

The News for Digital Journalists blog is made possible by a grant to USC Annenberg from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.