Uninformed News

(Above: Ethiopia, in case you were wondering)

I have a few words to say about how we read news.

Today I read that some negotiation of some sort was being settled in Ethiopia. The reason I don't remember what exactly was going on was because I didn't finish the article. Half way through my reading, I realized that I didn't know where Ethiopia was. I quickly went on wiki and found out, and that got me thinking...

How often do we know where our news is coming from? We know what is happening, but often have no idea where this is happening. This is especially prevalent in America, where citizens are rarely taught about the geography of anywhere but New York and Disneyland. Why is this important? Well, when people have a concrete idea of the physical location of an event, this makes this event seem more realistic, and has a much stronger impact on a person. The more familiar one is with a location, the more important the news is for this person. You care a lot more about bomb attacks in your hometown than those in some fictional land called Lebanon. Letting people be aware of where news is from makes it more real, making people care about it more.

I have an idea for how someone might let people become more aware of where there news is from: you could write a program/service that takes news from some source, and then places thumbnails of this news in the country/city where this event is taking place. Basically, you'd have a map with a bunch of news thumbnails and headlines, which you could then click on and then read.

If designed well, this program would give people the where of news. It would provide a new way of reading news by location, while educating the user not only on global events, but also a bit on geography as well. Plus, it'd be kind of cool. So yeah, if somebody did/has done this, it'd be pretty awesome.