Online Journalism News

Holovaty launches address-based news service EveryBlock

Adrian Holovaty, founder of local crime news site chicagocrime.org, has launched hyperlocal news websites for three US cities.

The Chicago, New York and San Francisco EveryBlock sites - part of the Everyblock project for which Holovaty won $1.1 million (£550,000) in last year's Knight News Challenge competition - allow users to search for news items by address, postcode or neighbourhood.

Results of news searches can be displayed on interactive maps and turned into a dedicated feed for that area.

News articles, blog entries, images and local authority information will be collected by the sites, which can also be browsed by news topics and neighbourhood.

The filtering process is achieved through a combination of a manual tagging and the development of algorithms that can find locations within free-form text, Holovaty said in an interview with Poynteronline.

"We're interested in spreading the concept of 'geocoding' news - that is, classifying news articles by location. Currently, we do that by crawling news sites and applying algorithms and human editing efforts, but it'd be best for everybody if news organizations did this on their own," Holovaty said.

According to the site's blog, plans to expand EveryBlock include collecting more local records from officials and four more types of data in each city.

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