What stands in the rubble of EveryBlock? A ton of lessons.

NBC Universal’s unexpected and abrupt closing Feb. 7 of the innovative news site shocked many newsroom entrepreneurs and set Twitter and the blogosphere afire with news updates and ruminations on the evolution of journalism online.  More than 1100 comments are attached to the closing announcement itself.  And today a branded Facebook flag appeared on the home page, as if to direct the EveryBlock community there. 

Many know EveryBlock for its community forums and its  aggregation of local news but it was originally an innovator in the Open Government movement. 

EveryBlock was started in Chicago by Adrian Holovaty originally as a mashup of crime data against Google maps of Chicago neighborhoods. In 2007, Halovaty was awarded a $1.1 million grant from the Knight News Challenge to build EveryBlock. The site was sold with some controversy to  MSNBC in 2009. EveryBlock's code is open source and available to any who want to use it. These days Holovaty is working on a new project, SoundSlice, and people person sidekick, Daniel X. O'Neil is running the Smart Chicago Collaborative for the Chicago Community Trust.

When I asked O'Neil whether he had any insight into NBC's actions he replied in an email: "I really don't have much insight, except to say that you're right that people can start their own spaces for discussion pretty easily. Re value to a public station, it seems NBC did what they could to get value, and yesterday they gave up....". Read Holovaty's statement about the closing and O'Neil's statement.

We spoke with four community news leaders and activists to get a sense of the legacy of EveryBlock's work. All were encouraged by the lessons learned and the rate of adoption of EveryBlock’s more innovative ideas. They also pointed to where to look in the future as the role of online communities evolve.

Joy Mayer 

2010-11 Fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute researching Audience Engagement, currently Associate Professor and Director of Community Outreach, Columbia Missourian 

Columbia is so media saturated, Mayer said that it can be “hard to find somebody who hasn’t been interviewed by the media here.” It's the perfect example of a place where it's hard to earn the attention of the audience. 

“Part of the genius of EveryBlock was that it was so audience focused,” she said, adding that newsrooms “ that break new ground make people feel uncomfortable.”

She remembers hearing Adrian Holovaty years ago talk about breaking data from the story and sharing it in ways that were easily searchable. It was hard for journalists to understand how data could be journalism. 

“It seemed strange to people that THAT was journalism because there was no story,” she said. “We have come along way from that.”

“We need people to do that — to show us how else we should be as journalists  thinking about information.” 

“There are so many ways to tell stories now to help communities understand themselves. It’s best to save the long narrative for when it is really needed,” she said.  

Mayer said that community leaders need to think about the information problem they need to solve. 

“What stories need to be told to help your community? What problem needs to be solved,” she said. And the EveryBlock way points to the question: What is the data set?

Online engagement begins with audience awareness and a product that is clearly designed for a specific audience and that is of utility to that audience.

A newsroom can cultivate a community around an issue and realize that ultimately the community  may or may not care about the newsroom itself.  “And that might be OK,” Mayer said, “because for anyone wanting to invest — say an advertiser —  you have to start with what the product is and who it is focused for.” 

Joaquín Alvarado

Chief Strategy Officer for the Center for Investigative Reporting. Knight Grantee

The Bay Citizen officially merged with the Center for Investigative Reporting. The merger brought together The Bay Citizen, an award-winning nonprofit news organization focused on the San Francisco Bay Area, and CIR, the nation’s longest running nonprofit investigative news organization. In 2009, CIR launched California Watch, which at the time was the largest investigative reporting team operating in the state. 

The organization's stories appear in hundreds of news outlets including NPR News, PBS Frontline, PBS NEWSHOUR, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, The Daily Beast, MinnPost and American Public Media's Marketplace.

“We have to be able to absorb what’s happened. It goes back to the lessons,” said Alvarado, who served as senior vice president for digital innovation at American Public Media and founding senior vice president for diversity and innovation at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. 

“Its cool that NBC bought EveryBlock,” says Alvarado, “EveryBlock was a really critical first flag in the ground. They deserve credit.” 

He noted that Vivian Shiller’s action in closing EveryBlock had to do with its viability as a business. “Everyone will always struggle with the revenue model,” he said. “We are in high risk industry trying to find a way.”

“Many start-ups don’t make it,” he said.

“This is not a short term project,” he says. “We’ve been actively addressing the collapse of journalism for the past seven or 8 years plus."

But “the people who worked on EveryBlock  don’t go away.  I am optimistic. The community around EveryBlock will keep working,” he said. 

What’s clear now that wasn’t so clear before EveryBlock is that one advantage of being more networked is greater engagement with the audience. 

“Being operable in a networked fashion reflects the time we live in,” he said.  

“There are a lot of shared learnings in that space,” he said, adding.  “There are not enough examples of highly engaged news operations.” 

Tim Regan-Porter

Director of the Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University. Knight Grantee

The Center is a unique community media collaborative combining Mercer’s liberal arts-based journalism and media studies program with the professional expertise of The Telegraph, Georgia’s third-largest daily newspaper, and Georgia Public Broadcasting, the third-largest public broadcaster in the country based on population reach.

Supported by nearly $6 million in grants from the John S. and James L. Knight and Peyton Anderson Foundations, the Collaborative seeks to transform a city that has remarkable inherent advantages in geography, higher education and culture, but weakness in attachment, openness, economic strength, and overall sense of community.  

“Theres a lot of history to the city [of Macon] good and bad,” Regan-Porter said. Problems include deep racial strife that goes to the civil rights era” and a high percentage of illiteracy in the population. 

So the question becomes: “How do we reach people who are not reached by traditional media?,” he said. 

“We are sad to see EveryBlock go,” Regan-Porter said. “We were looking into them pretty heavily.” 

In creating a community news site, the Center wants to take a different approach that complements but does not compete with its partners, a public broadcaster and traditional newspaper. 

“I think the biggest mistake media companies make is not thinking about how to add value to their content by not thinking about how people are going to use it and access it,” he said.

“I thought EverBlock was a great example of a company that was thinking [about how its content would be used]” he said. 

Their open government work helped to create a movement. 

Their innovation was to “take the information that is already being generated and make it more useful to people,” he said. He cites HomicideWatch as being the next generation in the same category. 

Steven Clift

Executive Director of E-Democracy and Knight Grantee 

From the website:

Starting with the world's first election information website in 1994 in Minnesota, E-Democracy today hosts more than 50 local Issues Forums in 17 communities across three countries - New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to these "online town halls" and its "community life" forums the non-profit promotes civic engagement online around the world. 

The lesson of Everyblock is the lesson he’s learned from years of building community online and offline: "Communities need to invest in solutions that work for them,” said Clift. 

“In a distributed world where neighbors are connecting, we need to help millions of Americans find [online community] groups,” he said. 

He suggests a role for community foundations in taking the lead and helping neighbors get out of their homes to meet each other. One good place to start is Cfleads.org, which says it “advances the practice of community leadership to build thriving communities.”

An essential aspect of online community building is finding somebody who has a passion to connect with others to launch the place-based community, Clift said. Once they are committed, they need help getting started.

“All these tools, how do we chose which ones to use,” Clift said. “The scale is simply you need to be local everywhere.”

Newspapers and other media have a bully pulpit that can focus the attention of people in a community on issues and convene them online and in the real world. 

“Why aren't newspapers doing this?,” he asked. “The editor-in-the- center approach is too ingrained in journalism.” 

Online communities can take many forms from a block club’s privately managed Google Group to a revenue based model like NextDoor. Clift argues strongly for inclusive, public online community gathering places. 

“When it is cloistered into private spaces, it might be great news for your block but bad news for America,” he said.

Clift is offering a course on how to engage a community online. “We’re saying, “Use the tools you want. Learn how to build neighborhoods online.”

The bottom line is that technology is the cheapest part, but “People are good with people,” he said.