After four Lakewood police officers were shot at a Forza coffee shop in Parkland on Sunday, November 29, police from Seattle and Pierce County scoured the region for the suspect, Maurice Clemmons. During the 40 or so hours following the crime, there was a dizzying amount of police activity in the region, including a failed hours-long standoff in the Leschi neighborhood of Seattle.
View Manhunt! in a larger map
I live in the nearby neighborhood of Mount Baker and was on news-junky high alert as helicopters circled Seattle’s central area all night long. After the police came up empty from the standoff in Leschi, they headed to Beacon Hill and Columbia City on separate tips, both neighborhoods that border mine on the south side.
Because it had become a national story at this point, family members and friends of mine in other states were asking how far away the police activity was happening from where I lived, so I created a simple Google map to show them. After I sent the link, it occurred to me none of the stories online were using a map to tell this particular story yet. So I kept adding to it from what I was learning on news sites, the police scanner and Twitter via the #washooting hash tag. Local media big and small started taking notice of the map, linked to it and traffic started pouring in.
Two things this unintentional experiment taught me about breaking news online:
1) People crave simplicity when things get complicated. There will always be a need for someone to distill information and make sense of it. I think maps, in general, are overused in the news business. But in this case – with this story – it couldn’t be told without a map. Seattle residents were worried about the police activity and having a suspected murderer on the loose. They wondered when it might affect their neighborhood or when it might stop affecting their neighborhood. There was an overwhelming amount of information out there, but scattered in a hundred different places, and not everybody has the patience to sift through all of it.
Side note: The best use I’ve seen of this type of breaking news via Google map came from the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2007 with their wildfire map. Another instance where residents felt surrounded by the news and needed to make visual sense of what was happening.
2) West Seattle Blog must get a SICK amount of traffic. At least half of the traffic sent to the map came from West Seattle Blog. Local advertisers would be crazy not to get their businesses on that blog asap.
