Wemap @ ONA 17
Direct engagement with newsrooms leads to further refinement of our solution to better meet the needs of partners.
The Online News Association’s annual conference, dubbed ONA 17, is the largest gathering of online news professionals in the world, bringing together all members of the eco-system — students, journalists, editors, producers, publishers, owners and more.
A full-recap of the event and all of the resources gathered by ONA can be found here.
As participants, we were able to have numerous insightful conversations with individuals from organizations big-and-small, with those just starting out in their career as well as those close to retirement. It was a phenomenal window into the current state of the news industry — more challenging than ever before — but also, critically, an opportunity to witness the vitality, the energy, the passion and the willingness to embrace technology as a way to improve the essence of journalism, story-telling.
The depth and breadth of the conversations during ONA 17 formed the ideal basis to get under-the-hood and look how some modficatios of our solution could help news organizations improve their story-telling capacities in ways that matter to their audience.
- Story ideas are turned around quickly, we need a tool that is as responsive as our journalists and editors.
Until you work with journalists and editors, you don’t realize how reactive a newsroom has to be. The 24-hour newscycle is 24/7/365 because the news organizations at the heart of it are able to produce content in such a grueling environment.
To respond to this need, we’ve moved to make our most popular connections available to our partners directly in the CMS.
Now, in just seconds, anyone in the newsroom can connect a GoogleSheet, determine the mapping and have a visualization of each point before creating the map itself.
The time from idea to product is now measured in seconds.
2. Marshaling the work our journalists do in new ways is vital to maximing the value of the contenty they create.
Journalists communicate with their audience through multiple different channels — Facebook, Facebook Live, Twitter, Instagram, Medium and more — with the by-line being just one of many lines of direct contact with the audience.
It’s critical for news organizations to leverage these channels to drive this fragmented audience back to the publisher’s platform itself and thus maximize the value of their journalists content.
To enable editors to leverage this off-platform activity and bring it back under their control, we’ve expanded our social media connectors to bring more options to our users.
For example, it’s now possible to geo-fence tweets to isolate an area for user-generated content.
It’s also possible to combine account names and hashtags (with geo-fencing) to follow photojournalists in the field as they document events big-and-small as the Austin American-Statesman did during Hurricane Harvey.
All of these features are now available for any entreprise-level user directly from pro.getwemap.com
3. Building solutions internally is critical to the intregation of new vendors.
In our ongoing conversations at ONA 17, it became clear that product development is an integral part of the modern newsroom. Everyday, news organizations big-and-small are looking at ways to build new user-facing solutions using products available in the marketplace.
To meet this demand, Wemap is documenting our API to allow third-parties to leverage our expertise in UI — mobile-first,AR, services, search, tags, dates, welcome cards, clustering, etc. — while empowering their teams to determine the best mechanisms to connect their content to our platform.
The Wemap Engine represents an important step forward for our company (and one that we’ll discuss in greater detail shortly) as we open our solution up to outside developers excited to find their own pathways to connect their content to our solution and continue to build-out the local information platform of tomorrow, today.
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Wemap developed a breakthrough map technology that has been adopted in a few months by global leaders like Le Parisien, Hachette and ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The French-American start-up is building a smart maps platform to offer individuals and organizations a bridge to the real world: combining meaningful information and practical services. Wemap combines an intuitive user experience and a powerful tool to connect a map to any sources and publish it. By empowering publishers to create and embed live maps with their content in minutes, Wemap has already reached 4 million monthly viewers of its maps.
To learn more about Wemap’s technology: https://getwemap.com.
