I would love to see the day when it is standard practice to include the latitude and longitude of locations in newspaper stories. Now that virtually everyone in the world, or at least those reading a newspaper, have access to powerful online mapping services I think it is something that people would find useful that want to put more context around a story that interests them.

It only takes an extra 23 characters, including the spaces and parenthesis, to include the coordinates of any location on Earth.

For example this is the exact place that the Southwest jet ran off the runway at Midway Airport and onto a city street. (N 41° 47' 33" W 87° 45' 43")

Or this is the location of the breached reservoir that spilled a billion gallons of water down the mountainside a couple days ago. (N 37° 32' 10" W 90° 49' 05")



Think how useful it would be to tell exactly where a traffic accident happened on a highway.

Where on a sidewalk something landed from a skyscraper. (Not uncommon in Chicago)

Where a record setting fish was caught.

Where a new wind farm is going to be located.

You get the idea.

It would be more foolproof than listing addresses because it can take time for new streets to get listed into the major online mapping databases.

For international stories it would be even more valuable since a lot of online mapping sites do not support international addresses.