Which news organizations are currently using geolocated news and what kind of content is being used? Amy Schmitz Weiss of San Diego State University, went through 173 mobile news apps by top news media outlets from the United States.

Broadcast companies had more location-based services enabled than other media outlets, the results show. Of all the 156 news apps that were found and reviewed, 47% had location-based services. For television news stations, the portion was 62%.

Traffic and weather were the most common types of content that were geolocated. Only two outlets, the radio stations WJR in Detroit and KLIF in Dallas-Ft. Worth, had geolocated their news content. Their apps showed users news articles from local news sources that were related to the user’s physical location at the moment.

As many consumers already have access to traffic and weather information, news organizations could focus on geolocating their own news content, the researcher concludes.

The article “Location-based news in mobile news apps” was published in Newspaper Research Journal and is available on the publisher’s website (abstract free).

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