By Leah McBride Mensching

EveryBlock.com, the Chicago-based hyperlocal site for 16 U.S. cities, serves up news, down to the block level. It's a job many believe newspapers should be doing, including Everyblock founder Adrian Holovaty. So why aren't newspapers doing it?

"Some newspapers in the states want to do this work, but it's still pretty rare," he told the World Editors Forum study tour at the EveryBlock office today. [2 December 2010]

The work, done by six full-time EveryBlock employees, serves up information like crime data, property transfers, building permits, restaurant reviews, inspection reports, real estate listings and local deals, all by geographical location, and organized by time, with the most recent data appearing at the top of the page.

For crime data, EveryBlock must get the raw data from the city's police department. For restaurant inspections, it must do the same with the health department. News from newspaper and other websites are the easiest and most scalable to get.

"For news articles (locations in the media), it's all automated. We crawl the Internet, and we check them many times a day, and whenever we find a new article, we automatically scan through it and find which pieces of text look like addresses and intersections, and then we cross-check that against our database of addresses, and we say it's a valid address, so we automatically populate all the pages near that address. It's not perfect - there are certain things it will miss - but there generally aren't a lot of things it'll get by mistake, other than an address in another city. For example, Main St. is a common name for U.S. cities. A lot of times we detect that, but sometimes we can't. It's all language-based, driven by algorithms," Holovaty explained.

Basically, the reason newspapers haven't captured the market EveryBlock serves is a case of technical expertise and manpower, he said. However, the media does want the information EveryBlock has.

"We are obsessed with date and time. It's all a timeline. If something doesn't have a recent date and time, we don't care about it. You can't go to our site and ask for nearby grocery stores, etc. We're not a city directory. For health and school information, a lot of that is static information, so it doesn't fit. However, if a school is mentioned in a news report, it shows up. In some cases it might show up in health inspection data, for example food service at a hospital, it would show up," he said.

In the future, EveryBlock is planning a redesign to make people more central to the experience.

"We don't want to invent a new social network, but there are a lot of things you can do if you know which people are interested in which neighborhoods. We're redesigning it to be more focused on postings and discussions by neighborhood residents," he explained.

Based on a recent survey EveryBlock did on its users, the majority of users are homeowners, about age 35 or older, have kids, and a good percentage are active in their neighborhoods.

Everyblock was bought by MSNBC in August 2009. Holovaty received a US$1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 for the site.

This story originally appeared on 2 December 2010 on WAN-IFRA's www.editorsweblog.org.