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NY Times Gives Its Audience a Locative Experience

By Satta Sarmah

The Lojo Team has been working hard to create a locative experience centered around Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics.

We’re attempting to venture into a realm that many media outlets have yet to explore—or so we thought.

As I was surfing the Internet looking for topics to blog about, I came across an interesting feature on the New York Times’ Web site.

In its travel section, the Times has a feature called “Rome at Night.” The feature is accompanied by the usual multimedia suspects–a map and a slideshow.

But what makes the Times’ feature so distinctive is the inclusion of a “Walking Tour of Rome at Night” that users can download to their Ipod.

The tour is narrated by Ian Fisher, chief of the newspaper’s Rome bureau. Fisher also wrote the accompanying article.

Since I’m not in Rome, I obviously can’t experience the tour first hand. Luckily, the NY Times had the foresight to allow the audience to experience the tour online.

The Web site has a map of Rome with more than 10 locations that people can visit on the walking tour. Each location on the online map has two buttons–one for sound and one for audio. People can click on either button to see a photo or hear information about the location.

After seeing the Times’ walking tour, I decided to do a Google search to see if any other publications had done something similar.

It turns out that from 2005-2006, Slate Magazine had a series of audio tours that users could download from its website.

Slate’s first tour was for the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Slate called it an unauthorized tour with “commentary museums don’t want you to hear.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the tour is that Slate’s art critic, Lee Seigel, tells you which paintings are the most overrated and underrated at the museum–a perspective that only a journalism critic could offer.

In previous discussions about locative storytelling, we said it was a great way for newspapers to tell innovative stories that discuss the history of place or report on a once-in-a-lifetime event like the Olympics.

The Times and Slate tours show that this kind of storytelling is great for travel sections as well. However, the challenge will be for news outlets to offer something to travelers that they can’t get from a tour created by a tourism bureau or travel business.

I’m sensing more unauthorized tours are in the works…

Saturday, May 17th, 2008 Filed under Audio tours, Interactive maps, Locative storytelling, Multimedia journalism |