The Maryland School Information Mapping Project continues to evolve, and both the project leader and the collaborating news site, Baltimore Brew, remain hopeful that the mapping application designed for the site will improve its ability to attract audiences.
“Education was not an original area of focus for Baltimore Brew,” Fern Shen said. When she launched the site, the Baltimore Sun had a dedicated education reporter and Shen decided instead to focus on areas such as the environment, transportation, city government and other local-level issues of interest.
Now, Shen is seeking funding for a reporter to focus primarily on education, complementing the data that will be available through this application when it launches in Fall 2010.
David Sides, the project manager, explained the site will “allow users to navigate to and select Baltimore City schools of interest, and explore student performance and demographic data.” It will also include Baltimore Brew-generated content and allow readers to respond and share information.
Shen and Sides are anticipating the map will generate “lots of traffic”, based on their measurements of similar kinds of content. Neighborhood posts, on issues like a proposed Wal-Mart redevelopment, get some of the most traffic on the Brew. “A good number for us for page-views-per-day, per post would be 1,000 to 1,400,” said Shen. She expects education reporting will attract similar readers.
Sides explains that on the technical end, the launch process has been more complicated: “Establishing tie-ins between the GIS data layers and Baltimore Brew’s architecture, and solving disagreements between map layer projections in an open-source platform has required more troubleshooting time than expected.”
And Shen adds: “The geo-tagging has been trickier and more time-consuming than we had initially thought. Some posts are not geographically based, really.” Shen is also discovering that her initial plan to tag according to broad areas is not enough. Instead she needs to tag with a specific address and re-tag all older stories.
Both the Brew and the Towson team express difficulty in getting the map to co-exist harmoniously within the site’s content. It has taken more programmer time to address this issue than either anticipated.
And Shen expressed difficulty in finding writers to cover stories, particularly on a small budget. “Only so many writers are able to work for peanuts!”
