Holovaty’s Everyblock launches, promotes geocoding of local news and data

Posted by Martin Stabe on 24 January 2008 at 09:12
Tags: Craigslist, data, geotagging

Everyblock, the company founded last year by US programmer-journalist Adrian Holovaty with a $1.1 million (£550,000) cash injection from the Knight News Challenge, has launched its eagerly-anticipated local news web site.

In an introductory blog post, the EveryBlock describes its mission this way: “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.”

The four-person company seeks to help make sense of the wealth of local news and information that is available on any number of web sites.

Users in the three American cities where the company is initially launching — Chicago, New York and San Francisco — will be able to enter an address to find local news and public information in that area, such as news stories from local media as well as council information such as building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections. The site also aggregates other locally-relevant data from around the web, such as classified advertisements from Craigslist and photographs from Flickr.

In an e-mail interview with Al Tomkins of the Poynter Institute, Holovaty explained that the site is complementary to local news media sites and that he is hoping to encourage news organisations to adopt geocoding to user-centric localisation to their web sites:

“On EveryBlock, you’ll find out when your local pizza place is inspected, but you won’t find an analysis of the mayoral budget or Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics (unless they plan to build a stadium near your house),” Holovaty told Tomkins.

The Homicide Report: Great journalism in blog format

Posted by Martin Stabe on 14 January 2008 at 08:20
Tags: Blogs, Los Angeles Times, data, mapping

US National Public Radio’s On the Media this week had an interview with Jill Leovy, a Los Angeles Times reporter who writes the Homicide Report, a blog that seeks to chronicle every murder in the California city.

The blog tells the story each murder victim in the city — stories so common that before the launch of the blog, they had often unreported. More than 800 stories later, Leovy is turning the blog over to another journalist.

The blog is also gained attention for some attention for its technological innovation. By structuring Leovy’s stories as a database, the paper was able to produce what is probably the most advanced interactive maps of crimes produced by a newspaper — a type of project that at least one UK newspaper has recently attempted.

There is a lot to be learned from the Homicide Report.

European farm subsidy site wins Freedom of Information award

Posted by Martin Stabe on 27 March 2007 at 15:55
Tags: Awards, Computer-Assisted Reporting, Washington Post, data

Nils Mulvad, Brigitte Alfter and Jack Thurston of Farmsubsidy.org have won a Freedom of Information award from the US-based group Investigative Reporters and Editors.

The web site, run by a pan-European group of journalists and researchers, reveals the subsidies large landowners receive under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It has been one of the best examples of international cooporation among journalists as well as the potential for using various countries’ Freedom of Information legislation to obtain data, and as an example of how journalists can use searchable databases to better illustrate complex stories.

Mulvad, a Danish journalist, is one of Europe’s leading figures in computer-assisted reporting. He is one-half of the CAR consultancy Kaas & Mulvad, which grew out of the now-defunct Danish International Centre for Analytical Reporting (DICAR).

He was one of the first European journalists to probe the recipients of common agricultural policy cash by using the Danish FOI law to obtain the CAP data for his country. Journalists from other countries, including the UK, later joined forces to make similar FOI requests and establish the site, which provides CAP disclosures from across the EU into a searchable database.

The site was modeled on a similar effort in the United States, where the Environmental Working Group has maintained a searchable database of Federal farm subsidies since the Washington Post first forced their disclosure through an FOI case in 1996.