Each week as part of the Knight International Media Innovators blog, the ICFJ Knight team will round up stories focused on how their fellows are making an impact in the field. Find out more about the fellows' projects by clicking here.
Just 10 years ago, creating an interactive online map was complicated, if not impossible, for most Web users. Now, journalists can design attractive maps in the cloud and publish them in minutes.
And in recent years, the news industry has seen exciting opportunities for Web-based maps beyond Google. The two-year-old company MapBox is an important driver of this development.
A product of the Washington-based company Development Seed, MapBox gives newsrooms and bloggers the ability to control how maps look and what data appears on these maps.
Knight International Journalism Fellow Gustavo Faleiros is tapping ordinary, environmentally concerned citizens in the Amazon region to help contribute data and information to InfoAmazonia, his digital mapping project that tracks deforestation. Faleiros says "citizen science" movements like this one can be a powerful force for connecting communities, for telling stories about the environment and health, and for helping explain the problems and issues to policymakers.
