by Danny Wilkins, Head of Technology News UK
How News UK moved from “Map Tuesdays” to creating maps daily on the fly
Newsrooms are an extremely high-pressure environment. We work to very tight deadlines, often dealing with breaking stories where being the first to publish gives us a significant advantage over our competition.
Our struggle
We always give 100% in everything that we do. Finding tools that make our life easier and make us more productive is essential and gives us a feeling that we are in control of what we are doing, right?
Also, we realised we’re too rigid in our schedules, even having a “Map Tuesday” on one title where all our maps had to be produced, allowing our graphics team to focus on other projects during the rest of the week. The problem was not just that though. The map creation was just taking too long and we had inconsistent results or missed out on complimenting a story with maps where we couldn’t resource the job. This needed to change.
The perfect solution
Then we discovered Mapcreator, or actually, they found us. It clicked immediately. Compared to other tools we tried, they convinced with the ease of use, implementing our in-house styles and icons, all the exciting features, options to customize the interface settings. Mapcreator really made our lives easier and we were able to free up our graphic designer’s time again for what they’re really good at: being creative.
Onboarding
Mapcreator’s team made sure to show us everything about the tool in various training sessions in our office.
They also fine-tuned our map templates and update them according to the latest layout changes we give them.
I especially knew working with Mapcreator paid off when I saw the graphics team in training and witnessed that moment where they realise how much work this is going to save them. Now we use Mapcreator across our three titles in our graphics teams and are looking to introduce it to other teams like the picture desk. I can only recommend Mapcreator and their service to anyone who wants to give back graphic designer’s time.
News UK is a London based newspaper publisher, currently publishing the compact newspaper The Times, the broadsheet The Sunday Times and a tabloid The Sun. They produce maps with Mapcreator since more than 2 years.
