Magazine
Ideas
A New Chip off the Old Block
In 2005, Washingtonpost.com editor Adrian Holovaty had an idea: What if there was a Web page dedicated to a city’s every block? So he built Chicagocrime.org, which used the code behind Google Maps to allow visitors to search any block in Chicago and come back with a list of recent crimes. It wasn’t long before Holovaty wanted to add other types of data to the site. Two years later, he won a $1.1 million grant from the Knight News Challenge, which awards $5 million annually to innovative journalistic projects that make use of new media. He quit his job at the Post and, in 2007, EveryBlock.com was born.
Today, EveryBlock.com includes such hard to find civic data as city council minutes, building permits, the results of restaurant inspections, and crime and real estate listings, to name a few. News articles as well as restaurant and business reviews are included, as are photos posted via Flickr or other photo-sharing sites. Accessing the information is easy: Type in an address or zip code in any of the nine cities the site covers — Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. – and relevant results appear.
None of this information is original reporting. Data and articles come from outlets as diverse as the Chicago Tribune and Yelp.com, and are captured by a programming script that trawls the Internet for relevant pages. “We simply crawl and index, except instead of indexing by keywords, as Google does, we index by geography,” Holovaty explains.
Local news aggregation is part of the future — where things are definitely going,” says online journalist Brian Kennedy. “But I don’t know if it’s possible to fully automate it.”
At first blush, the concept behind EveryBlock makes sense: With the amount of media already out there, how better to capture it than with an automated program? Certainly, the data on the Web site provides users anywhere in the world a snapshot of a neighborhood’s civic and, to some extent, cultural goings on. And there is much to be said for capturing, organizing and centralizing information as opposed to adding to it. But the absence of an editorial hand is also the site’s weakness; results don’t do much to enlighten visitors about a neighborhood’s character. For instance, a recent search of a Harlem address (my own) brought up real estate listings, the results of restaurant inspections, and articles from the New York Times, the Daily News and the Observer that mentioned Harlem or nearby Central Park. There were also crime listings from surrounding precincts, a restaurant review and a couple of hazy photos (via Flickr) of the interior of an apartment. But because nothing has been published in the past week that gets to the real flavor of the neighborhood, a stranger would have no idea that, say, central Harlem is contending with gentrification and the social issues that come with it. The Web site, then, is kind of like those flowers for sale at the corner deli — beautiful, perhaps, but when you put your nose to petals, there isn’t any smell. Put another way: One would like to think one’s neighborhood is greater than the sum of its parts — a concept that’s essential to the greatness of any city. On EveryBlock, there are parts, but no whole.
“Local news aggregation is part of the future — where things are definitely going,” says online journalist Brian Kennedy. “But I don’t know if it’s possible to fully automate it.” As for Web sites that collect relevant results by script, he says, “I have much better experience looking at blogs written by locals.”
The concept behind Brad Flora’s windycitizen.com, a Chicago-based Web site launched in April 2008, improves on the EveryBlock model. Like EveryBlock, Flora’s Web site captures and organizes articles that are already out in the world. But WindyCitizen is designed so that visitors submit news they feel is significant. Those articles are then voted upon by site visitors and then ranked in order of importance. Here, the editorial hand comes from local bloggers and writers, giving the Web site the sort of heft and flavor that a site run by script alone lacks.
Currently, EveryBlock is working toward using visitors’ feedback to catalyze civic activism. “We’ve built an infrastructure for petitions, so that we can organize citizen demand for public records,” Holovaty says. “For example, each crime report on our Chicago site has a footnote that says, ‘Would you like to see more information about this crime? So would we!’ Visitors can then click to sign a petition asking the police department to release more data.” If the initiative works, it may enhance the Web site’s sense of community, or even transcend the Web’s echo-chamber.
This article appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!
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