Adrian Holovaty's chicagocrime.org site is sometimes called the first Internet Mashup. It takes crime data and combines it with Google Maps to create an interactive tool for exploring where and when crime takes place throughout Chicago (see Important Reading for links to some of Adrian's insightful posts that offer good advice to journalists everywhere).

In my Technological Effects post, I wrote about the economic effects that technological changes are bringing about to the news media. New technology (if it's good) either lets you do something you already do less expensively, or it lets you do something you weren't capable of doing before. In some cases, it does a little of both and I would use this site as an example of such a feat.

chicagocrime.org doesn't "tell a story" in the traditional journalistic sense in that it foregoes narrative descriptions of events. It tells a different kind of story by providing the user with a means to search through crime data in a way that is meaningful to her, and it shows relationships among crimes that may not readily be apparent without the visualization tools provided by Google Maps. This is an example of the Internet allowing a journalism to do something totally new, while still fulfilling to goals of good journalism. It is also very cheap to do.

The site is not perfect. A few of the issues are that:

While it is by no means a replacement for traditional crime coverage it does serve as a good example of how creative thinking about news presentation can both improve the quality of information available to citizens while also limiting costs to news organizations.