A journalist who fell in love with data

Adrian Holovaty’s EveryBlock.com tells you all about your neighborhood-including who’s taking bribes. Is it a future of local journalism?The Chicago Tribune published an inspiring profile of Holovaty, part programmer, part journalist, and his online ventures, including the recent one – EveryBlock.com.

This is a hyper-local news site based on databases searchable by location.”Type in your ZIP code or neighborhood name -in Chicago and four other cities, 10 total by this time next year-and get a site-specific news report, including location-tagged blog posts, news articles from other sites, even lost-and-found postings from Craigslist.”

According to the Tribune, ”many believe [it] will help define the future of journalism. [...] News organizations are vying to go hyper-local, in the belief that national and international news are readily available commodities on the Web. And while EveryBlock draws criticism for failing to put its news into context, what the site does is point the way toward incorporating the mass of public data into the news presentation: going hyper-hyper-local, if you will.”

The Holovaty’s site is funded by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The Tribune acknowledges that Holovaty ”is not one of those Web types who hates newspapers or relishes their current economic plight. He recognizes that papers have had a model that funds a lot of public-interest work and there is, currently, no model in sight to replace that.”

Some quotes:

• Holovaty about tradition story-based journalism vs. data processing: ”EveryBlock is one piece of the puzzle. It’s never going to replace narrative or investigative journalism.”
• Holovaty on whether he would feature user-generated content, articles and images submitted by average readers: “Here’s the way I look at it. I don’t like doing trendy things just because they’re trendy. I’m like the anti-buzz, anti-trendiness startup. It’s not in Silicon Valley. It’s not using venture capital. It’s not hitting all the buzzwords.”
• Holovaty on innovations in newsmedia: “I’m just amazed at how much the news industry does because other people are doing it. There’s no sense of individuality or entrepreneurship.”
• Rob Curley, former boss of Holovaty at Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, on how to manage such talents inside the organisation: “My biggest goal when I worked with Adrian in Lawrence was to keep the bureaucracy and all the crap away from him and to give him as little direction as possible.”

About Adrian Holovaty

A journalist and computer programmer is a well-known advocate for idea of “journalism via computer programming.”

Before EveryBlock, he has developed award-winning Web applications for washingtonpost.com, Lawrence.com and LJWorld.com. His 2005 data-mining project chicagocrime.org won the Grand Prize in the 2005 Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism.

He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and lives with his wife in Chicago. For fun, he plays gypsy-jazz guitar and posts YouTube videos.

He writes a blog on ”Web development, with an emphasis on online journalism.”

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