No more than 107 miles away …

FROM A GOLDEN ARCH.

Last Saturday we stumbled upon an example of how quickly a story gets distorted through social media, bloggers and Twitter. Even when the front and back of the trail involved professional journalists. (HERE)

This great map of McDonald restaurant locations was created by Stephen Von Worley in his September 22nd entry Where The Buffalo Roamed:

From Worley’s blog:

… and the nice folks at AggData were kind enough to provide it to me: a complete list of all 13,000-or-so U.S. restaurants, in CSV format, geolocated for maximum convenience.

HOW IT GOT HERE

Read about the 107 mile distance in Dan Mitchell’s item in Daily Bread: The Business of Food. This is an item in The Big Money section of the online magazine Slate.com.
But this item was just re-reporting on the following article …

Dan Mitchell was reposting information from Kathrine Glover’s Oct 28th article: On McDonald’s, Iceland and the Definition of Being Everywhere. Glover is a “Food Analyst” writing for BNET.com, the self described “Go-to place for Management.”

Glover was commenting on a Salon.com article about the closing of stores in Iceland and …

But Lyst (franchise owner) isn’t shutting down the McDonald’s restaurants; it’s just rebranding them so it can change up the menu and source more local food. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

The Iceland story did get me wondering about where McDonald’s is and isn’t, so I did some poking around. The McDonald’s location map above shows that within the United States, McDonald’s really is everywhere, if one defines “everywhere” as “within 107 miles of anywhere” (or 145 miles by car).

NOW WHAT

One news item: Andrew Ward, 26 Oct, “McDonald’s Pulls out of Iceland” Financial Times

is re-reported by Andrew Leonard one day later in a Salon.com piece.

Kathrine Glover combines the Salon.com article with a creative item, Worley’s map, to make a compelling reflection in BNET.com

That is re-reported in Slate.com. With no one forgetting attribution.

Let’s get lunch!

Mike “FossilMedic” Ward