EveryBlock.com just launched. The news site enables users to search for stories and information by address, zip code or neighborhood. The site won’t compete with traditional media, but its ‘geocoding’ technology and functions should be of interest to newspapers.

Founder Adrian Holovaty had won a $1.1 grant from the Knight Foundation to carry out this project.

The site is currently available in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. The current interface is somewhat bland – although clean and spacey – but the layout serves its purpose well: namely to search news by location.

Said Holovaty in a Q&A with the Poynter Institute:

“I think the concept of address-specific news is important because, well, people tend to be more interested in news that happens near them. It's as simple as that!”

Users can also search for news by type of information, such as restaurant inspections, mainstream media articles, blog entries, crimes, and more.

“I don't consider EveryBlock a competitor to traditional news outlets because we only include news that has to do with specific, granular locations -- not citywide, statewide or nationwide news,” answered Holovaty.

“On EveryBlock, you'll find out when your local pizza place is inspected, but you won't find an analysis of the mayoral budget or Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics (unless they plan to build a stadium near your house).”

Newsrooms could be interested in ‘geocoding’ news – classifying articles by location. Currently, EveryBlock.com crawls news sites, but Holovaty hopes that in the future news organizations will geocode news on their own. Perhaps EveryBlock is even the first step towards a Web standard for geocoding.

Source: Poynter Institute