What is EveryBlock?

EveryBlock is a new experiment in online journalism, offering a news feed for every city block in 15 cities. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.

What problem does EveryBlock solve?

We want to answer the question "What’s happening in my neighborhood?"

In dense, bustling cities, 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.

What can readers find on EveryBlock?

We point our readers to three broad categories of local 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.

All of this information is presented in an easy-to-use interface. There’s no need to register; feel free to search for any address anonymously.

To view the complete, current list of information we publish, click "Browse news by type" at the top of any EveryBlock page. Note that each city has different data sets, so it’s worth exploring each list to see the full scope of our project.

What can readers NOT find on EveryBlock?

• We only publish news that’s relevant to the block or neighborhood level. Anything that applies to a larger area (e.g., the entire city, or a New York City borough) is outside the scope of our site.
• We focus on news, as opposed to static data. On EveryBlock, you’ll find a list of recent restaurant inspections near you, but you won’t find a list of the train stations or schools near you. We’re a news site, not a city directory. Roughly speaking, we’re interested in local data that has a date and a specific location.
• Our policy is to avoid publishing data that identifies addresses of people, for privacy reasons. Hence, we don’t publish sex offender data, or divorce records, etc. The exception to this policy is mainstream news articles; if a newspaper publishes a person’s address, our system will detect the address in the article and link to it.

How does EveryBlock get its information?

Through a lot of good, old-fashioned hard work!

Each type of information we publish on EveryBlock comes from a specific source, with a specific method. We obtain some data by parsing government Web sites and crawling the Web; in other cases, governments send us data that isn’t available online.

In each case, we document where we get the information and how often it’s updated. We also try to explain parts of the information that don’t immediately make sense, like government designations and codes. To find out more about any data type on EveryBlock, visit the "Browse news by type" page and click "More info..." next to the data type you’re interested in.

Who is EveryBlock’s audience?

Our goal is to make a site that offers interesting, useful, timely and relevant news to any person who lives or works in the cities we cover.

How new/old is this project?

Here are some significant events in our project’s history, so far:

• In July 2007, we began working.
• On January 23, 2008, we launched our first three cities: Chicago, New York and San Francisco.
• On June 30, 2008, we launched sites for Charlotte and Philadelphia.
• On August 18, 2008, we launched sites for Boston, Seattle and Washington, DC.
• On August 27, 2008, we launched a site for Los Angeles.
• On Oct. 30, 2008, we launched sites for Miami-Dade and San Jose.
• On June 8, 2009, we launched beta sites for Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit and Houston.

You can see more specific events on our site-news blog, particularly in the archives.

How can I keep updated with the latest news around my block/neighborhood?

If you don’t have time to visit your EveryBlock page on a regular basis, you can sign up for our e-mail alerts or RSS feeds, which we offer for every block, neighborhood and ZIP code in each EveryBlock city. This means you can get a custom-tailored daily e-mail for your block, containing the latest news we’ve found around you.

To sign up for e-mail alerts for a given geographic area, go to the appropriate block/neighborhood page (example) and click "E-mail updates" in the upper right. Registration is free, and e-mails are sent daily.

Similarly, to access our block- and neighborhood-specific RSS feeds, click the "RSS" link next to the "E-mail updates" link. If you’re not sure what RSS is, visit the What is RSS? site.

How can I keep updated with the latest EveryBlock features?

Visit the EveryBlock blog to read about the latest features and data sets we’ve added to our site. We’re a small, fast-moving team, and we make improvements on a weekly, even daily, basis. The blog has an RSS feed, too, if you’re into that.

If you use Twitter, you should also check out our Twitter account, @everyblock, where we post various tidbits about our site.

Why do your maps look different than maps on other sites?

Rather than using a third-party map provider, such as Google Maps, we’ve designed our own maps to fit better with our design and our custom data-visualization needs. (Here’s a map example.)

Third-party providers such as Google Maps do not allow the level of design control that we’d like. If we used Google Maps, our maps would include one-way-street markings, building outlines, address ranges and other cruft that we believe gets in the way of the data. Google’s maps are great for Google’s purposes (driving directions, etc.), but not as great for ours.

Why are some news items on EveryBlock not displayed on the maps?

Sometimes our system cannot determine where a given address lies on the map. In technical terms, this means some items cannot be "geocoded."

Whenever this happens, we still publish the data, but it doesn’t appear on our maps, nor does it appear on block, neighborhood or ZIP code pages. We’ve been improving our geocoding ability so that this problem happens less frequently.

For more on this, see the answer to the next question.

Who is behind EveryBlock?

EveryBlock was created by a Chicago-based team of four, and we’ve expanded to six full-time team members. You can read more about us on our about page.

Are you hiring?

No, we’re not hiring at this time. If and when we hire more people, we’ll announce it on our blog.

How can I contact the team?

Just shoot an e-mail to feedback at everyblock.com or use the convenient feedback form at the bottom of almost any EveryBlock page.

Which cities are you in?

You’ll get the most up-to-date answer by visiting our home page, which lists all of the EveryBlock cities.

Which cities are you planning to add?

We don’t comment about future cities, mostly because we don’t want to raise expectations too high.

Will you please bring EveryBlock to my city?

Cast your vote! Click "Don’t see your city?" on our homepage and let us know which city you’d like us to add. We’ll use this feedback to help guide our growth plans.

Why haven’t you covered any suburban locations?

It would likely take just as much effort to add, say, Oak Park, Illinois, than it would to add Houston, so it’s a question of bang-for-the-buck. But, with that said, we would indeed like to experiment with some suburban locations and smaller towns, so stay tuned.

Does EveryBlock have plans to move beyond the U.S.A.?

Sure, we wouldn’t rule it out.

How is EveryBlock funded?

Our project is made possible by a generous two-year grant from the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest held by the Knight Foundation. With this grant, the Knight Foundation has three primary goals:

• To benefit specific communities by funding the creation and maintenance of the everyblock.com site for those communities
• To promote experimentation in the news industry
• To help news organizations, governments and communities by funding the creation of open-source code that anybody can use to create a similar site

Is EveryBlock a non-profit?

No. We’ve incorporated as a for-profit business. Our grant allows us to do this — the Knight Foundation is interested in seeing this become a sustainable project.

How will EveryBlock sustain itself once the grant period is over?

We plan to experiment with various models, including useful local advertising.

What are EveryBlock’s future plans?

Over time, we’ll be expanding to other cities, adding data sources to our existing city sites and adding features to all sites.

In June 2009, when our grant period is over, we’ll be releasing our site’s source code free to the public, under an open-source license. More on this in a subsequent FAQ answer.

When will EveryBlock’s source code be released, and what does that mean?

Our source code will be released at the end of our grant period, in June 2009.

This means anybody — news organizations, governments or independent citizens — will be able to create sites that work like EveryBlock, given the technical expertise.

Per the terms of our grant, the code will be released under the GPL (the GNU General Public License).

Does EveryBlock accept advertising?

Although we are fully funded by a grant, we are open to experimenting with useful, nonintrusive advertisements. Please get in touch with us if you’re interested.

Does EveryBlock partner with media outlets and/or bloggers?

Yes! We are indeed interested in partnering with existing media outlets and bloggers in the current EveryBlock cities. For example, check out our partnerships with the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times.

Please get in touch with us if you’re interested. Note that, at this time, we only consider partnerships in the cities we already cover.

Does EveryBlock have an API?

We don’t have a formal API at this point, but we do offer customizable RSS feeds for every block, ZIP code and neighborhood in each EveryBlock city. For information on how to access a particular RSS feed, see the answer to "How can I keep updated with the latest news around my block/neighborhood?" above.

What can and can’t I do with EveryBlock’s data?

We intend our RSS feeds to be used for personal, noncommercial use, so you can keep track of news in your neighborhood.

With that said, we know there’s some demand for embedding our data on third-party Web sites. For instance, you might want to embed our neighborhood-specific RSS feed into the sidebar of your neighborhood blog. We want to encourage that sort of informal linking because it helps you (it gives you content) and it helps us (it helps spread the word about EveryBlock). Here’s our policy:

• You may display the title of each RSS entry, as long as you link it directly to the appropriate page for that entry on EveryBlock.com.
• You may not embed the actual content of each RSS entry — that is, everything other than the headline of the RSS entry.
• You may not scrape our data wholesale and redisplay it on a third-party Web site.

One reason for this policy has to do with the expectations we’ve set with the people who provide us with information. We enter into a number of formal and informal agreements with services and governments that allow us to syndicate their data in specific ways. In order to maintain these agreements, we cannot knowingly allow this content to be used on other Web sites.

A second reason is the amount of effort and resources we put into acquiring data and preparing it for presentation on our site. Although much of what we publish begins as public record, we add significant value to the information by geocoding it, explaining arcane government language, adding visualizations and normalizing it in various non-trivial ways.

Lastly, we’re looking into ways to support data syndication in a more formal fashion, so stay tuned. If you have any specific ideas, let us know by e-mailing feedback at everyblock.com.

What technologies does EveryBlock use?

Our site uses a stack of open-source software: PostgreSQL, PostGIS and Django. We’re lucky enough to use the Python programming language.

For our servers, we’re happy clients of Media Temple.

Describe a typical day at the office.

Looking to add that personal touch or anecdote to your story, eh? There’s nothing exciting to report here. It’s a bunch of people typing into computers. We do have a Nerf basketball hoop, so we try to shoot a few baskets over the course of the day to give our eyes a rest.

Is this journalism?

Rather than arguing over semantics, we prefer to spend our time building a Web site that people find useful — whether the academics call it "journalism" or not.

Is EveryBlock the future of news?

If it is, it’s only one small part of the future of news. As mentioned above, we have a very narrow focus. It would be a pity if people used us as their only news source.

How did you come up with the idea for EveryBlock?

In May 2005, EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty launched a site called chicagocrime.org, which was one of the original "Google Maps mashups." That site included a page for every block in the city, with a list of crimes that had been reported on that block. Adrian thought that concept of "a page for every block" was quite powerful and quickly found himself wanting to add more data to chicagocrime.org, but he never got around to it, as chicagocrime.org was just a side project created for the fun of it.

The opportunity to take chicagocrime.org to the next level came in late 2006, when Adrian applied to the Knight News Challenge, a journalism innovation contest put on by the Knight Foundation. They were looking to fund new ideas in the world of journalism, and they liked the EveryBlock idea, so Adrian was awarded a $1.1 million grant over two years, with the requirement that the site’s code be open-sourced at the end of the grant period so that other people could build similar sites. With that financial stability, he was able to leave his job at washingtonpost.com to work on EveryBlock full time, and five other full-time team members have joined since.

Do you have a nice, short blurb that describes EveryBlock?

Yes! Here you go:

EveryBlock is a local news Web site with a twist: it offers news down to the block level.

Here’s a slightly longer one:

EveryBlock is a local news Web site with a twist: it offers news down to the block level. Enter any address in one of the supported cities, and you’ll see news articles, blog coverage, crime reports and a wide variety of other local information, all updated throughout the day.