Adrian Holovaty, the journalist with a computer science degree, has launched EveryBlock, his Knight Foundation-funded project. The Online Journalism Review’s Robert Niles talks to Holovaty about the project, which launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

To Holovaty, EveryBlock is “a way to browse news at the block level, with a news page for every block.” Crime information is something that Holovaty has previously documented with his ChicagoCrime.org project. But the new project extends beyond it, providing “some information that didn’t previously exist online,” such as film locations in Chicago and restaurant inspections in San Francisco.

“We make it easy to browse information that already existed online, but was buried in deep government sites or in non-Web friendly formats such as PDFs,” says Holovaty.
Another mission of EveryBlock is to detect “geography in narratives – ‘blobs,’ so to speak — and making it easy for people to find relevant news articles and government documents” that refer to specific places near them. “We’ve established many relationships with government officials and other partners who are responsible for local data,” he adds.