Technically Speaking, June 8, 2008

By Sue Fine

First Published: June 2008

Push-pins, a digital map and geocoded data give Ohio town a new window on itself

Cincinnati’s CinciNavigator showcases the customer-centered benefits of geotagging a news site’s hyperlocal content

In Hollywood’s 2002 science fiction movie, Minority Report, details of life in the far future include breaking news that rewrites e-inked front pages on the fly and billboards that call out the latest automotive deals to individual commuters as they speed along in slick, futuristic cars.

The industry’s ability to deliver just that kind of news and advertising — personalized and location specific — is not far off. Unlike the movie, the process of doing so will be customer controlled, and getting there is likely to be by geotagging enriched local content, which is both easier and less invasive than retinal scanning.

Geotagging (or geocoding) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata, frequently stated in latitude and longitude, to an information resource, and also of taking non-coordinate based geographical identifiers, such as a postal address, and assigning geographic coordinates to them.

CinciNavigator: The Customer Experience
Once they home in on a neighborhood, street or house on the ’Navigator e-map, customers can pull in information associated with the location, including

1. Crime reports
2. News stories
3. New vendor licenses
4. Property sales
5. Dog licenses
6. Police calls and arrests
7. Smoking complaints

Superimposed on a map of downtown Cincinnati, icons pinpoint news stories, live traffic conditions
and new business licenses issued during a specific timeframe.

Each appears on the e-map as a color coded push-pin or news icon.  In addition, readers can view traffic cams and get real-time traffic reports. Bookmarks allow customers to personalize preferred geographic area and zoom level, and specify certain views, date ranges and data sources. As they browse the site, related advertising appears on the information page — i.e., the crime reports page may have a message from a home security service.

The Enquirer plans to make other content accessible through CinciNavigator in the future: transportation information (bus schedules, etc.), directory information, restaurants, entertainment listings, even classified ads for garage sales, cars and jobs. Further down the line there may be email and text alerts, but the infrastructure for that is not yet ready.

In an article Butts wrote, published by Forbes.com, he notes that “readers and customers want to know ‘What’s happening in my neighborhood.’” CinciNavigator allows them to find out, interactively.

The site still carries the “Beta” tag of a work-in-progress, with more features planned and being developed. Overall, feedback is very positive, and many revisions have been made to the interface based on reader suggestions. “When you build a product out, you know how you would search for things,’ said Butts, “but in finding out how others search and get confused or lost, we’ve made changes to help them find things more easily.”

CinciNavigator: Building It
“CinciNavigator was the end result of a call to action Gannett made for Local Information Centers, throughout the company, to become more involved with providing readers with searchable databases,” says Butts. In a response that signaled the management team’s strong level of commitment to the project, the newsroom hired a full time developer — Andy Crain — and moved Butts in from Online Product Development to guide and oversee all data related operations.” It was Crain who had the original idea to map data on top of data with the e-map as the visual underpinning.

The project took nearly a year to develop, says Butts, and “the biggest roadblock we had to deal with was time, the vast majority [of it] spent building out the database and import processes. That required a big leap of faith from our management team. We helped overcome that by doing whatever we could to show results along the way. One vendor, Caspio, allowed us to easily publish simpler databases without involving a high level developer.”

An estimated 25 percent of project time was spent with the technical details of building and testing the system, and the other 75 percent went to the backend gathering of information, tagging it and building the import processes.

And, geotagging? “Geotagging is done on one level or another for all of our circulation areas [which include counties in Ohio and northern Kentucky],” according to Butts. Not all data sets apply to all area, though. “Ohio Smoking Ban Violations, for example, don’t apply to Kentucky where there is no ban, but we have at least some data being geocoded for the entire area."

Lessons learned?
Butts’ advice is to “Understand the time and resource investment: CinciNavigator was not an easy thing to build. It took a year and a full-time developer. Also, you need to build relationship in the community. Getting data isn’t always easy.”

The payoff, as Butts wrote for the Forbes.com column, is that after it launched in September 2007, “CinciNavigator generated more than 570,000 page views in the first six months and led to record-high traffic in adjacent searchable databases. We’ve recorded user-visit times as high as five minutes — two minutes longer than average.

“More significant, the database infrastructure that underlies CinciNavigator allows us to develop a new generation of online products and strategies to drive traffic and advertising revenue.”