Community-News Site EveryBlock is Back in Action

Less than a year after it was shut down, community-news website EveryBlock has returned to the Internet.

Comcast has restored the site and launched a new version in Chicago Thursday.

The site was initially launched by Chicago journalist and web developer Adrian Holovaty in 2008 with a grant from the Knight Foundation and covered neighborhood news in up to 19 cities. The site was acquired by MSNBC.com in 2009, but was shut down after MSNBC was acquired by NBC News.

"The premise of EveryBlock was to offer you a custom site devoted to news in your neighborhood,” Holovaty wrote in a blog post announcing the site’s end. “We showed you nearby public records (crimes, building permits, restaurant inspections), pointed you to automatically indexed articles (newspapers, blogs, forums) and provided a sort of "geo-forum" that let you talk with people who lived near you.”

“More than six years ago, I wrote a blog post that got some attention about how newspaper (and, really, journalism) sites needed to change,” he wrote. “EveryBlock was an attempt at that kind of change -- in my eyes, a successful attempt. EveryBlock was among the more innovative and ambitious journalism projects at a time when journalism desperately needed innovation and ambition.”
 

Contact Us