Friday, July 18, 2008

Can We Find It on a Map?

What makes the P & C shy away from using maps? Does it cost more? As I read about the extension of the Glenn McConnell Parkway in West Ashley in Friday's edition [ Council OKs Glenn McConnell Extension], I couldn't visualize where the road would end. I'm in that area fairly frequently. How about those who rarely travel there?

Bees Ferry Circle? Long Savannah and Village Green?

Wouldn't it be informative to readers to show all the impacted areas on a MAP? Maybe if more readers had maps to reference, they might even understand possible impacts of the new extensions.

Then again, maybe that's why there is no map!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The motto of the NY Times once was, "All the News that's fit to print." Many other American city dailies also saw this as their mantra. Now with so many alternatives, accurate or not, traditional print news organizations have gone the way of the network news desks. They have become "profit centers" that measure their success by how much they can charge for advertising calculated on the best guess of the "audience share" they can command. Not just because of the shrinking size of the paper used, the new motto has become a shorter version of the old one: "All the news that fits."

Maps are too big. The majority probably couldn't read one anyway. To boot, media demographers [read this as experts with briefcases] say the average newspaper reader maxes out at an eighth grade reading level. Just as with CCSD, why bother wasting resources to stretch or extend the intelligence of the masses?

Anonymous said...

The paper only has one person left in the graphics department so there's only so much he can do until they make him work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, which is only a matter of time.