Leslie Rule on New Media Technology

Locative Media: media bound to a location, applied to real places, and with the potential to trigger real social interactions and the goal to engage.
“On any corner, in any city in any place, there is a whole history that has occurred there,” Rule said. “Tagging content to this place can create an online experience.”

Tagging Content: Words, images and video tagged to a specific place of news value, also called “Geo-tagging”. The best place to do this is with Google Earth (http://earth.google.com).  The content can be words, links, pictures and video so a whole multimedia experience is created.

“What locative media does is it creates a new media landscape,” Rule said. “All of us are very closely tied to our place, and this creates a very active community.”

Rule said environmental journalism lends itself well to locative media, by showing readers where the subject of a story is taking place. I am an environmental reporter, so the thought of being able to really take my readers to a specific location and show them what is happening there, my stories would have much more of an effect.

Rule gave an example of a cell phone in the future that will vibrate when you pass a Starbucks and send you a text message offering you a coupon for 15% off a latte. I do not like the idea of this from a consumer standpoint, because I see it as over stimulation and over selling. But at the same time, as a reporter, being able to create media at a given location and simultaneously send it out as a geo-tag is very interesting. There has to be some balance there, although I don’t see how.

I can also see this as a huge boon for the travel industry, and travel writers. Being able to create a multi-media project at different locations that could then be cataloged for reference by future travelers to see a place and get a different view than they would in a travel magazine or even on a travel website.

But what is the journalistic content on this? This is what George Rede of the Oregonion asked, and it needed to be said. The fact is, the definition of journalism is changing and shifting from a publication focus to a community focus. The debate between editorial content and user content has only just begun.