Marc Fest is Vice President of Communications at Knight Foundation.

An article in today’s New York Times talks about some of Knight Foundation’s experiments in hyperlocal journalism. Specifically, it mentions Knight projects Everyblock.com and Placeblogger.com.

One of the questions in the article is what will happen to local news, as cities’ newspapers keep failing? That question has prompted Knight Foundation’s local news experiments for the past three years. In particular, we recognize that information is a core need of communities in a democracy. That’s why Knight Foundation funds community experiments through the Knight News Challenge; community information sites through the Community Information Challenge; an examination of policy through the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy; and studies ways to bring about universal access in local communities through a digital access project.

In the article, Journalism Program director Gary Kebbel says the news business “is in a difficult time period right now, between what was and what will be.” And that’s why Knight Foundation funds community news experiments.

Today, Knight News Challenge (the ~$5 million yearly contest to find innovative ideas for news delivery) winner Everyblock announced a partnership with the New York Times to add political news items to the NYC block pages.

When an elected official representing your neighborhood is mentioned in the NYT, you'll find the mention on Everyblock as well.

Congrats to the Everyblock team on the new feature, and please leave comments and feedback for them on their announcement post.

Spurred by recent comments on our July 31st Knight Blog entry about his work, Mario Garcia posted on the Garcia Media blog yesterday asking readers what they think about four organizations Knight Blog commenter Robert Ivan cited as innovative:

- Rob Curley and The Las Vegas Sun
- Adrian Holovaty and Everyblock
- Alan Taylor and The Big Picture
- The New York Times audio slide shows (NYT Multimedia)

One of the four, Everyblock, is a "news feed for your block" and a Knight News Challenge winner. As we've posted previously, Everyblock continues to add cities to its roster (most recently, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, DC), delivering information about crimes, news articles, and road construction, among other data sets, as well as special reports.

What do you think about these four projects?

As Garcia writes:

Dear readers, as I am not familiarized thoroughly with the innovators mentioned by Robert Ivan, I ask you to enter the dialog and contribute your comments on them, and what you think makes them special. I am sure we can learn tremendously if we profile these cases and benefit from their experience. All of us are interested in reviewing products that have encountered success via experimentation and it is my hope that we can profile these four innovators in future blogs. I need your help to do so! If those involved in these products wish to engage in dialog through this platform, I would appreciate that as well.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and join the discussion in the Garcia Media post comments.

This weekend, the Chicago Tribune ran a story about Knight News Challenge winner Everyblock and its founder, Adrian Holovaty.

And yesterday, the Everyblock project ("a news feed for your block") expanded into three new cities: Boston, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

Director of Knight Journalism program Gary Kebbel gives Everyblock background:

Adrian Holovaty won a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to create a public data and aggregation site on steroids for at least 10 cities. Called EveryBlock, the sites have launched in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Charlotte. Public databases are pulled together and then made so easily accessible that all anyone has to do is put in a street address to find out what is happening on their block or the next block over.

Holovaty started this work with ChicagoCrime.org, which was the first major “mashup” of public data (Chicago crime reports) on a Google map. The site won the Knight-Batten Award for Innovation and was the beginning of Holovaty’s efforts to help people find previously inaccessible information relevant to their lives.

The Tribune article references the Everyblock widget, a small application that has let readers associate a physical location with Tribune stories for the past month.

Also in the article, Holovaty explains how to launch a project from the Windy City:

"There's the dot-com, Silicon Valley, blow-all-your-money-on-booze style," says Holovaty, 27. "Then there's the Chicago thing: Do something, do it well and be modest about it."

Read the entire article here.

What are your thoughts on Everyblock? How would you explain a digital project launched in, say, the DC, Austin, or Vancouver Way?

Knight News Challenge winner Everyblock, "a new way to find local news and public information," has launched two new city sites: Charlotte and Philadelphia.

The Everyblock team has added a data type for new library items in Charlotte, and more details on the new sites are in the Everyblock blog post announcement.

Charlotte and Philadelphia join Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in the Everyblock city roster.

Congratulations to the Everyblock team--

EveryBlock is a Knight News Challenge project that filters local news down to the block and neighborhood levels in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

The EveryBlock team has just released its first "special report," a new category for information that is too unique for other site categories and deserving of special editorial insertion in the EveryBlock system.

The first report is on the recent Chicago FBI corruption probe "Operation Crooked Code"; the blog post introducing the special reports is here, and the report itself is here.

Pieces of this first special report are integrated into the rest of the Chicago EveryBlock site; EveryBlock leader Adrian Holovaty explains,

We've found that this really helps the news feel closer to home, so to speak. Hearing about these indictments in the news is one thing, but finding out a bribe allegedly took place at the Dunkin Donuts by your office puts things in a new perspective.

For more on EveryBlock, watch Holovaty's opening keynote at Where 2.0 (the O'Reilly conference on the geospatial web) below:

And, find out how to make custom maps with free tools from EveryBlocker Paul Smith and slick, accessible charts from EveryBlocker Wilson Miner.