Maps and the News

SVS Animation 3338 - Tropospheric Ozone Impacts Global Climate Warming

This weeks blog focuses on maps and their use in world events, better known as the news. No matter where you go for a dose of the news you will notice an increase mapped images. A recent trend among news papers and television news broadcasts is the use of maps to support information. Maps have always been used to depict our geographical world in a compact and easy-to-understand piece of paper but current trends in news reporting have created an employment nitch for professional cartographers. The use of maps in everyday news reports not only helps support a reporters view point, it examines the report in a fundamentally different fashion. The above link (tropospheric Ozone Impacts) takes you to a site that has complied information over a 100 year period and presented it through a map. It's a fair to say that most people have heard about global warming at one point or another in the news. The map in this link depicts global warming like no news report could ever hope to-check it out, you'll be amazed.
The following site http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/flash/ attempts to take cartography to another level in terms of maps and the news. This site allows you to visit nearly every major news paper publication in the world from the comfort of your computer. Using a world map, all the major newspapers are represented like attributes, when you click on an attribute it opens the local news paper and you are allowed read the frontpage articles if you like what your reading there's a link that takes you to the newspapers website. This site is so cool I've given it a perminate spot in my links list.