Mapping tools for journalists
BatchGeo is popular with media publishing outlets from local newspapers to international networks. Our tools work quickly with data formats that are common in the world of media and journalism. Click on the logos below to see some examples of popular publishers using our tools to tell a story.
BatchGeo makes it easy to turn a spreadsheet of data into a map that you can publish on your website. Your map will be hosted for free using our service and can be updated at any time using our map editing tools.
See other user created maps on our examples page, or read on for how journalists use BatchGeo to create better stories.
"It's a fast way to make it look like you did a whole bunch of work, and that's never a bad thing." - Lifehacker
Maps help tell the story
A journalist’s job is to get to the truth, or at least the point, so the reader can be more informed. Data can help expose facts that help a journalist tell important stories. Sometimes, visualizations of the data themselves can tell the story.
Maps help unlock geographic data from the shackles of spreadsheets. That’s not to say spreadsheets are a bad thing. A spreadsheet is a great way to store, sort, and evaluate data. Often another tool is needed to extract useful information from the spreadsheet. When there are places involved, a map is your best way to display your data.
BatchGeo helps you create maps from Excel and other spreadsheets.
Maps extend data-driven journalism
In recent years, data-driven journalism emerged as an accepted field in its own. While computer-assisted reporting is a term used for several decades, ubiquity of data and equipment means the role now encompasses more. Some large newspapers have multiple data journalists on staff, with a full-time focus on finding and telling stories within the data.
Many times, these data stories are told better with visualizations, and maps are the best way to show geographic data—and most stories have a location element. Finding and filtering data is an important part of data-driven journalism, but the visualization is often how it is consumed by the reader.
BatchGeo is flexible with the types of geographic data it accepts. You can geocode addresses, city names, neighborhoods, zip codes, landmarks, or even map coordinates themselves.
1,000s of stories in public data
Governments are making more data available and making it more accessible. Data journalists can find and tell many stories with local government data, at the state/region level, or with federal data. Further, there are crowdsourced data repositories that hold many stories on their own.
From campaign finance to health code violations to police reports, there are many types of open data waiting for your visualizations. If your data is in a spreadsheet, BatchGeo helps you map open data with a simple copy and paste.
BatchGeo’s advanced features, like map clustering with counts, averages, and sums helps your story unfold at different zoom levels, and brings a bird’s eye view to the story.
BatchGeo lets the reader tell their own story
Interactive maps provide more than one angle at the data in a story. The best maps go beyond simply clicking markers to look at the data beneath. The marker colors change based on their data, you can summarize with clustering, and you can filter based on the data available.
It takes a lot of work to code your own Google Maps. To add interactive features is more work still. BatchGeo makes it as simple as Copy, Paste, Map.
When readers can explore a map, such as with our powerful data grouping feature, they can create their own story. Further, journalists can use the map to find their own new stories, or ask readers for suggestions.
Your effort should be on the data and the stories, not the technology. It’s like Lifehacker said, "It's a fast way to make it look like you did a whole bunch of work."
Find some data and make a BatchGeo map now.
