Don't you people look up police reports on your street?
EveryBlock is a hyperlocal -- or, to use the term it prefers, microlocal -- aggregator. It offers a news feed for every block in, so far, 15 cities, based on public records, blogs, photo-sharing sites, review sites such as Yelp and so on. Here's the feed for Salon's block in San Francisco.
It should be obvious from following that link that EveryBlock as it appears today is hardly "the answer" for hyperlocal news. At this writing, for example, the top two items are police reports headlined "Unknown" that include this information: "Incident type: Unknown. Result: Unknown."
Thanks for the info, EveryBlock!
But it's a start. It's something. It's impossible to look at EveryBlock and not see a steppingstone. In announcing the sale, EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty wrote, "Our site is very young -- it's only been live for about a year and a half -- and we have a lot of ideas and expansion plans. I often tell friends and industry colleagues that EveryBlock in is current incarnation is only about 5 percent of what we want to do with it."
EveryBlock is a pioneer in the use of data as journalism, and my guess is that the lasting importance of this sale will be the introduction of that concept to the mainstream.
Holovaty writes that EveryBlock will continue to exist as a separate site, with MSNBC.com incorporating it into its own local sites and helping EveryBlock expand.
A lot of the talk around the sale has to do with what it means for EveryBlock's open-source code. I'll leave that interesting conversation to those who plausibly know what they're talking about.
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
Good question. But first: I just noticed some bad coding, and there is, I think, about a paragraph and a half in the story that wasn't there until a second ago. Included in that is a link to an oreilly.com story about this sale. Click the words "data as journalism."
The writer there, Brady Forrest, makes this point, which I think addresses your question:
"There is a coming deluge of data from the new administration. Sites like Data.gov, USASpending.gov and Recovery.gov are hopefully just the beginning of new data sources. It's already too much for many organizations to make sense of. Without the proper tools many stories will never be covered. People will not get the info they need. Everyblock has proven that by taking free local government data sources and making them readily available to interested citizens you can create value."
Emphasis mine.
Will a lot of database-driven journalism be minutia and drivel? Oh hell yes. Of course. A lot of ALL journalism is minutia and drivel. I mean, here's a headline in Salon's "Five Things" right now: "Man with Spears tattoo steals Chihuahua."
But what I think EveryBlock represents is the raw data being made available to the public. It's a form of journalism. It's of a piece with the various ways (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube etc.) that sources have of communicating with the public. Those things don't completely eliminate the need for trained journalists with professional standards and so on. But they give more people access to the raw material that used to be available only, or mostly, to reporters. That can only be a good thing. It makes more reporters, and it raises the standards for the pros. We have to add value over and above what civilians can do for themselves with the raw material.
More information. When is that not better?
Sweet
and the Washington Post just ditched its several year experiment LoudounExtra.com. It showed great promise and was even rather popular. But it drained resources and didn't cover expenses.
Maybe MSNBC, with access to national ads, will be more successful.
The New York Times has hyperlocal sites as well, Maplewood NJ is a "busier" site that comes to mind. But ads are few and I've noticed postings are following suit.
Remember, too, that most community newspapers have at least one site, and some manage to do a better than decent job. I think MSNBC will find that it's not so easy to cover someone's backyard unless they're in it. And, from experience, I know how very hard it is to find consistent, thorough citizen journos and bloggers .... consistent especially.
I heard, too, that hyperlocal is part of AOL's new biz model. Will be interesting to see if they can do local well, and manage to make a buck or two.
~rocco and rusty,
the well informed rescuers
What Cindy said. Plus this:
I did a random check of the site for Boston. Chose the Jamaica Plains neighborhood. Here's what I found:
* Briefs about two old-movie festivals and a gay dance.
* Three items that might have been taken from the police blotter but were, (if you read the fine print at the bottom) "posted by Media Relations," i.e., the police dept.'s flack.
* A list of 42 other such "stories" listed during the week.
Conclusion: this isn't "data as journalism" (whatever that means) or even what you call "a form of journalism." It's PR. What's worse, especially in the police news "stories," it's PR disguised as journalism. "More reporters" aren't being created here -- more flacks are, whether the public knows it or not.
It's nothing new, unless you think scamming readers is new.
What I'm more interested in is a genuine filter that helps aggregate *and screen* the results based on my desires plus a random fudge factor, a la David Brin in "Earth."