The Evolving Newsroom

If you’ve ever looked at everyblock.com and wondered how they do it, wonder no more. The creators have released the source code used to develop the site. Thanks to Kirk LaPointe for the link.

EveryBlock is the brainchild of Adrian Holovaty, a journalist and programmer, and development team Paul Smith, Wilson Miner, Daniel X O’Neil, Paul Wilson and Joseph Kocherhans.

The site pulls in a variety of official data such as crime and housing statistics, business licences, library catalogues and news feeds, and displays it by location.

It came about through a $1.1m grant from the Knight Foundation, the terms of which required the source code to be made public, although I gather the development team retain rights to the name EveryBlock.

This is great news for enterprising journalists/programmers anywhere in the world who want to see how EveryBlock was done and perhaps adapt the idea for their local area.

I’m no judge of code, but it would seem that it is a fine piece of work, if these quotes included in Regina McCombs’ piece on Poynter Online are anything to go by:

As Jeremy Bowers, news technologist at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times explains it, the programming language is iron and lumber, the web app framework is the hammer and nails. The chance to see how the guy who built the tools used them to build an elegant house is an important one.

Ben Welsh, a database producer at the Los Angeles Times, said that was the big draw for him. “It’s a high profile site that is recognized across the board for its sophistication, and I was curious to see how that sophistication was achieved.”

“All of this code is really simple, clean, really well written,” Bowers said. We’re working on something simliar, but Adrian’s code is much better than mine.”

Regina points out that a project like EveryBlock is not for everyone.

Welsh warns that it’s not something that someone new to Django will be able to just pick up and use. “The learning curve is pretty high. It’s advanced stuff.”

“If you think you just turn it on and put some ads on it and it will make money for you, you’re high,” said Matt Waite, news technologist at the St. Pete Times. “By the same token, it’s a real gift for the people like us who do this to see how the guy who built the framework eats his own dog food.” (With a silver spoon, Bowers added.)

I met Adrian very briefly at Webstock this year, where he was a speaker (his Webstock presentation is embedded below), and asked him what would happen next, given that his team have done all this work but are bound by the terms of their funding. He said, basically, ‘good question’. They were having to think hard about where to take the project next.

But on the EveryBlock blog, he says: “We’ve put a lot of love into this project over the past two years, and we’re going to continue operating the site as a private company. Beyond continuing our steady expansion of new cities and more data types in existing cities, we have some exciting ideas planned around revolutionizing the whole EveryBlock experience itself. We’re only getting started. :-)”

Whatever the team do next, it’s bound to be interesting. As for the EveryBlock code, Regina quotes Holovaty in her final paragraph:

“That’s what Holovaty said he is hoping people recognize: “A LOT of love and hard work has gone into it over the past two years. I hope that whoever uses it appreciates it and uses it for good, not evil.”

Here’s Adrian’s presentation from Webstock this year:

Adrian Holovaty at Webstock 09 from Webstock on Vimeo.