Today's prognostication: Fifty
to 100 years from now, historians and demographers will look at the era
from 1990 to 2005 as one characterized by intense global population
mobility.
Any major city in Southeast Asia these days is
loaded with people from throughout that broad region. Any major
citiy in Europe is loaded with people from other nations, especially
the former USSR, the Mideast and Africa. And the blending of
geography, demography and economics makes for fascinating stories IF we
have the tools to tease out the interesting and important facts and
trends.
The Jan-March 2005 issue of ESRI's ArcUser
magazine is especially rich for analytic journalists and the JAGIS
[Journalism and GIS] crowd. The latter will be especially
interested in:
“GIS Tracks Earnings Sent Home by Mexican Migrants.”
The piece, by two geographers from SUNY-Cortland, illustrates the money
flow to individual Mexican states. Unfortunately we don't have
data and maps showing the U.S. states-of-origin of those dollars, but the
methodology will be of interest to geographers and journalists
everywhere.
GIS Management is
essentially the same as managing a CAR or Analytic Journalism operation
in a news organization. The same issue of ArcUser leads with
three articles on how to establish successful GIS programs; just
replace “GIS” with “AJ” and the concepts translate easily.
So check out “Enterpriseing GIS Management” ; “Supporting Successful Enterprise GIS Solutions” ; “Building an Enterprise GIS in a Limited Fiscal Environment“; “Evaluating Enterprise GIS Requirements” and “Powering Up Your Enterprise GIS.”
Finally, the IAJ gang has been promoting performance measurement (and
forensic accounting) as important tools for journalists for the past
couple years. Another story in ArcUser, “Performance Measurement in Local Government,” illustrates how GIS is a valuable analytic and measurement tool, one which journalists could easily adopt.
