About EveryBlock
EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.
"What’s happening in my neighborhood?"
For a long time, that’s been a tough question to answer. In dense, bustling cities like Chicago, New York and San Francisco, the number of daily media reports, government proceedings and local Internet conversations is staggering. Every day, a wealth of local information is created — officials inspect restaurants, journalists cover fires and Web users post photographs — but who has time to sort through all of that?
Our mission at EveryBlock is to solve that problem. We aim to collect all of the news and civic goings-on that have happened recently in your city, and make it simple for you to keep track of news in particular areas. We’re a geographic filter — a "news feed" for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.
At this time, we cover three American cities: Chicago, New York and San Francisco. On each site, you can type in any address to read local news and public information near you. You’ll find three main types of news:
- Civic information — building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in hard-to-find government databases. In other cases, this information has never been posted online, and we’ve forged relationships with governments to make it available.
- News articles and blog entries — major newspapers, community weeklies, TV and radio news stations, local specialty publications and local blogs. We do the work of classifying articles by geography, so you can easily find the mainstream media coverage near particular locations.
- Fun from across the Web — local photos posted to the Flickr photo-sharing site, user reviews of local businesses on Yelp, lost and found postings from Craigslist and more. We figure out the relevant places and point you to location-specific items you might not have known about.
We like to toss around the word "news" to describe all of this, and that might surprise you at first. Isn’t news what appears on the front page of the New York Times? Isn’t news something produced by professional journalists?
Well, it can be — and we include as much of that on EveryBlock as possible. But, in our minds, "news" at the neighborhood or block level means a lot more. On EveryBlock, "Somebody reviewed the new Italian restaurant down the street on Yelp" is news. "Somebody took a photo of that cool house on your block and posted it to Flickr" is news. "The NYPD posted its weekly crime report for your neighborhood" is news. If it’s in your neighborhood and it happened recently, it’s news on EveryBlock.
Our team (more about us below) has worked long and hard to bring you these three sites — but they’re just the beginning. In the grand 21st Century tradition, our site is a work in progress, and we intend to add data and features rapidly. If you have ideas, or find kinks in the system, we hope you’ll take a moment to send us feedback at feedback at everyblock.com. Every message goes to all four of us, and we read every one.
We’ve had a ton of fun clicking around our sites while we’ve been building them, and we hope you find them useful, fun and serendipitous. Enjoy!
Team
Adrian Holovaty
Adrian Holovaty leads the EveryBlock team. He’s a journalist and Web developer who is well known in online journalism circles as one of the pioneers of "journalism via computer programming" on the Web. Previously, he worked as editor of editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com and developed one of the original Google Maps mashups, chicagocrime.org.
Geeks might know Adrian as the co-creator and Benevolent Dictator For Life of Django, an open-source framework that helps programmers build Web sites. He co-wrote the Django Book and has released a number of open-source projects, including a hack that inspired the creation of Greasemonkey.
He sits on the National Advisory Board of the Poynter Institute and was the 2007 Hearst New Media Lecturer at Columbia University’s Journalism School.
Adrian lives with his wife in Chicago and spends his free time playing gypsy-jazz guitar and posting YouTube videos. 2,300 subscribers and counting!
Contact Adrian at adrian at everyblock.com.
Paul Smith
Paul Smith is a developer at EveryBlock. He’s been developing Web sites and applications for over a decade. Prior to EveryBlock, he was a freelance developer for sites such as Crain’s Chicago Business and chrishayes.org. He worked for the Center for Neighborhood Technology as webmaster developing sites such as Civic Footprint, and as lead technology director for the Wireless Community Networks project.
Paul is also co-creator of the Election Day Advent Calendar, and co-founder and board member of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, a rails-to-trails project in Chicago.
Paul grew up in Maryland and currently resides in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago.
Contact Paul at paul at everyblock.com.
Wilson Miner
Wilson is the designer for EveryBlock. He built his first site in PageMill 1.0, which seemed like a good idea at the time. He’s been building standards-based Web sites since 2001.
Before working on EveryBlock, Wilson was a designer for apple.com. He also worked for the Web team at the Lawrence Journal-World, where he met Adrian and contributed to the early development of Django. In 2005, Wilson helped Adrian design chicagocrime.org, where the kernel of EveryBlock was born.
Wilson is a native Kansan and currently lives in San Francisco. He writes occasionally at wilsonminer.com.
Contact Wilson at wilson at everyblock.com.
Daniel X. O’Neil
Daniel X. O’Neil is the People Person at EveryBlock, responsible for working with local governments to uncover new data sets. He also writes poetry books, has a weblog, and maintains a number of other Web sites. More here.
If you’re a city government official with access to data for EveryBlock, contact Dan at danx at everyblock.com or 773-321-8146.
Paul Wilson
Paul is EveryBlock’s managing editor, responsible for the site’s news operations. He previously held reporting jobs at The Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., and The Charleston (W. Va.) Gazette. He is an award-winning reporter, earning honors mostly for business writing.
Paul graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism, where he met Adrian. The pair worked together for three years at the university’s student-run newspaper, The Maneater.
Paul is a newspaper brat, growing up around his parents’ newsroom at the Bigfork (Mont.) Eagle. His father was a long-time reporter and manager with The Associated Press, and his mom was a copy editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and the Arizona Republic, among other papers.
Paul lives in the Wrigleyville neighborhood in Chicago, where he spends his free time foolishly believing that 100 years is a charm for his beloved Chicago Cubs.
Contact Paul at pwilson at everyblock.com.
Joseph Kocherhans
Joseph is a developer at EveryBlock. Before coming to EveryBlock, he worked on the Web team at the Lawrence Journal-World, leading the creation of the award-winning business directory Marketplace, and refining the Ellington content management system.
Joseph is also one of the leading contributors to the Django Web framework, while simultaneously working several years as an independent freelance developer.
Joseph grew up in Salt Lake City and lives in Chicago. He loves a good music scene, and has a strange obsession with the Charango.
Contact Joseph at joseph at everyblock.com.
Funding
Our project is made possible by a generous grant from the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest held by the Knight Foundation.
Contact
Feedback and general contact
Suggestions, bug reports, love letters? We’d love to hear from you. Send them all to feedback at everyblock.com
Data providers and content publishers
Got some data we might be interested in? Contact Dan at danx at everyblock.com or 773 321 8146.