We have a drone at The Press (actually, it’s our second drone, I’m sworn to secrecy about the status of the first drone).

It’s significantly improved our coverage of certain stories where an
aerial shot can be used to help explain an issue or put it into perspective.

We’re not new to using aerial images, we used to hire a plane (i
nfrequently) in the past to take a photographer up to take certain shots, but that was usually an expensive endeavor, and they would get as many shots for as many possible stories as they could. Not only expensive, but it took a lot of pre-planning.

Now, we can get something at a moment’s notice if a story lends itself to it.

We’ve had fun videos of the annual polar bear plunge, dramatic footage of rebuilding a beach that had eroded and lots of shots of areas proposed for development.

At first, there was a real wow factor when we used the drone, but now it’s become a matter of course and, I think, an integral part of our journalism toolbox.

Depending on the regulations, and how they develop, I think you’ll see drone footage used more and more to help explain stories.

I’m curious to see if the addition of smaller 360-cameras like the 360-fly will add an ever greater dimension to the footage as the technology continues to improve. Maybe something to try soon.

So while perusing available sensors on Sparkfun.com, I found exactly what I hoped I would find, a dissolved oxygen sensor. No, really.

Dissolved Oxygen Kit

The quality of water in the bays on eastern Long Island is always a concern and something we write about quite often at The Press
. 

Basically, and I’m over-simplifying this because I’m not a scientist, nitrogen from yard fertilizers and septic systems run off into enclosed saltwater bays, overfeeding underwater plant life and causing it to grow. You’d think that was a good thing, but the plants (seagrasses, etc.) draw needed oxygen out of the water (dissolved oxygen, or DO). Fish and other marine life need that oxygen, too, so when the level of dissolved oxygen decreases, the marine life die off because they basically suffocate to death.

So as a news organization, we’re always reporting on “fish kills” and other environmental issues int he bays AFTER the fact. And we rely on various scientific and environmental organizations to describe the condition of the bays and the DO levels.

How cool would it be to have the dissolved oxygen kit sensor from Sparkfun to be able to get DO levels either before conditions got to a crisis stage, or, afterward to be able to get our own readings to help the reader understand what happened without relying on the scientific data.

Maybe we could even set up a few senors around town and have a live feed to our website, so that readers could track the DO levels over time. We could incorporate it into an interactive map, so readers could click around and see how different bays are doing.

I think that would be pretty proactive journalism.

So here’s a story from Newsday (a little advertorial, but that’s OK) about an island (and, of course, the 4,000-square-foot house on it) for sale just a little north of me: An island for sale in Southold at $2.495M, house included.

There are a lot of real estate stories on Long Island, especially out east where I am. It’s the primary industry and is interesting both to the real estate industry folks, the locals who support the industry and the folks like Bob Bierman who come out and ruin the summer for us locals.

A story like this would be perfect for a virtual reality piece, if it could be done quickly and fairly cheaply. There’s no telling how long the property will be on the market, so you don’t want to dump too many resources into it, but it could be up for grabs for a year or more, maybe even two. The $2.5 million price tag is actually pretty affordable for property out here, so it’s a bit of a bargain.

So imagine how cool it would be to start a VR experience at the bridge from the mainland onto this property, follow the driveway up to the house, tour the house, take a swim in the pool and then take a leisurely walk along the half-mile of beachfront and the woods surrounding the house. Make you want to pony up the $2.5 mil yet?

The article on Newsday has one crappy photo, and an aerial at that, that doesn’t even show the house.

Look, everyone on Long Island who doesn’t own a McMansion dreams of owning a home like this, or a larger $10 million to $30 million McMansion on the ocean or bay, so why not feed into that dream and let people take a walk through these kinds of properties, even if only digitally for a while.

I imagine that would get a lot of hits on the web and be a pretty cool feature. If you did one for a listing or two a week, you’d really have something there.