{ "id": "2003-julyaugust-gps-units-add-depth-to-reporting", "slug": "2003-julyaugust-gps-units-add-depth-to-reporting", "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-julyaugust-gps-units-add-depth-to-reporting.html", "year": 2003, "month": "July/August", "monthNum": 7, "headline": "GPS units add depth to reporting", "kicker": "CAR TOOL", "author_name": "Matthew Waite", "author_title": "Reporter", "affiliation": "St. Petersburg Times", "summary": "A journalist explains how GPS technology and geographic mapping tools have become invaluable for reporting, allowing him to quickly create location-based analyses and maps for both deadline and investigative stories.", "keywords": [ "GPS", "mapping", "journalism" ], "topics": [ "Technology", "Investigative Methods" ], "technologies": [ "GPS", "ArcView", "Maptitude", "GIS" ], "full_text": "You won't hear me complaining about military spending anytime soon. The U.S. government - bless it - dropped $90 million to add another Global Positioning System satellite at the end of March, and I gleefully paid my taxes two weeks later.\n\nGiddy about paying taxes? Sure. I'm happy to contribute my small sum to the $2.5 billion Global Positioning System constellation of 28 satellites that surrounds the planet and blankets it with low-power radio waves. Before you report me to the mental health authorities, let me explain why I'm so happy: It helps me do my job as a reporter.\n\nI believe GPS is the best little-used tool in journalism. A GPS receiver, mapping software and a little know-how are all you need to do your own geographic analysis. Think of it as building your own databases, only with maps.\n\nYou can do this all very quickly and accurately. In the past, a reporter going after a plane that crashed in a remote area had to try to explain the accident location over the phone. Now, a reporter with a GPS unit can, depending on how close he gets to the crash, plot the crash location within a few feet.\n\nGPS is a handy tool on deadline and off. Off deadline, I used GPS to create what the state of Florida lacked a few years ago: a map of traffic signal locations. The state had only engineering drawings and computer-aided drafting files showing the locations. So I decided to create a map. I got in the car with my GPS and my wife at the wheel. Within an hour I had a point map of every traffic signal on a stretch of U.S. 19, a deadly road I was writing about. That map became an important part of my analysis in ArcView, because I could layer deaths and traffic control lights. On one section of roadway with the most traffic control lights, there were no deaths in more than a decade.\n\nOf all deaths, more than 80 percent were people crossing away from crosswalks. (See the story at www.sptimes.com/2002/01/20/Pasco/At_any_time__crossing.shtml)\n\nOn deadline, GPS can help locate events or create maps of new roads.\n\nHere's a step-by-step example of how I used GPS for a daily news story:\n\nOne night, after deadline, I heard an emergency search call on the police radio scanner for a missing elderly man. This happens all the time in Florida, so I wasn't very interested. Then I heard someone call for a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter to pull him out of a swamp in the middle of the night. That sounded like news.\n\nSo I went to the scene - a golf course covered in the darkness - and watched as a huge helicopter hovered over the man, lowered a basket down to a group of sopping wet sheriff's deputies and hoisted him away to a local hospital.\n\nThat night, I grabbed as many interviews with deputies that I could, and I grabbed a scorecard for the golf course.\n\nEarly the next morning I returned with my GPS unit and laptop. I plotted the points where the man went into the swamp looking for golf balls and where the sheriff's deputies went into the swamp to find him. I also plotted the points of the tee box and cup from the nearest hole to where the man was found. Why do this? You can get details like distances and reference points. And, using a satellite map of the area, you can also make great graphics. (See the story, without the graphic, at www.sptimes.com/2002/04/09/TampaBay/Off_the_course_and_st.shtml)\n\nThere are several ways to get GPS data from your unit into your geographic information system software. The one I used until recently is Maptitude 4.05 or later. Within the past few months, ArcView 8.3, through a free download, has added GPS support that rivals Maptitude's. ArcView 3.x users can find shareware and free scripts for almost any GPS device, though they are not nearly as easy or intuitive as either Maptitude or ArcView 8.3.\n\nMaptitude (www.caliper.com/maptovu.htm) and now ArcView 8.3 (http://support.esri.com index.cfm?fa=downloa.samplesUtilities.viewSample&PID=43&MetalD=537) allow you to plug in your GPS unit via a serial cable (or USB, depending on the unit) that's often included with the unit. It plots your location live on a map. In one menu, you can configure and control your GPS unit, and control what data is displayed.\n\nUsing either software package you can record events (points) and save them in various GIS formats. You can use your GIS program's distance measuring tool to calculate the distances between points. That's how I measured how far the elderly man on the golf course was from the tee box.\n\nBelieve it or not, GPS units aren't just for recording a position. One day I covered a new toll highway that was opening to traffic. Many, including my editors, wondered what the road would be like, how fast you could go from point A to point B, and so on. I went out with my GPS unit and drove my county's leg from one county line to the other several times. The first time I did it mostly to make a GIS map of the road that I could include in other maps of the county. But my GPS - a Garmin GPS III+ - also records speed: how fast was I going when the plot was taken. A few more times up and down the road, with traffic, stopping for tolls, and I had a pretty good average speed for the roadway.\n\nThe analysis gave readers one sentence that no one else had: Average speed on the new road was 58 in a 65 mph zone. Not bad when you consider a driver has to stop twice unless his vehicle has an E-ZPass electronic tag that allows automated toll collection.\n\nSome journalists like to call those statements computer-assisted paragraphs, and GPS is great for them if you can get used to operating your unit quickly. For instance, I covered an experimental-plane crash deep in a nature preserve. We had to get an escort from the sheriff's office to take us nearly two miles into the preserve where the plane went down. The experimental plane apparently lost power and tried to land on a nature trail. The cut in the trees wasn't wide enough for the wings, and you can figure out the rest.\n\nWith my GPS, I was able to plot my location near the downed plane and the takeoff location (the distance was less than a half mile). I told our graphic artist about the location and they created a graphic that ran in the paper. I guess you call that computer-assisted graphics.\n\nThe applications for GPS are as limitless as the uses of GIS. With GPS units starting under $100, this is an inexpensive tool for the newsroom, one that we as a profession are missing out on.", "provenance": { "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6", "extracted_at": "2026-07-05", "verified": true }, "similar": [ { "slug": "2005-novemberdecember-gis-gps-after-the-storm", "score": 0.448 }, { "slug": "2003-julyaugust-buying-a-gps", "score": 0.415 }, { "slug": "1996-february-lost-your-way-in-car-maybe-a-map-would-help", "score": 0.166 }, { "slug": "1991-july-mapping-a-new-future-for-reporting", "score": 0.143 }, { "slug": "2000-september-for-more-information", "score": 0.142 } ], "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-julyaugust-gps-units-add-depth-to-reporting.html", "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-julyaugust-gps-units-add-depth-to-reporting.json" }