Out With A Bang

We mentioned it the other day; that for us the future of local news might be something akin to EveryBlock with a journalistic cherry on top…

So it was interesting to see Mr EveryBlock himself ride into town this week to deliver a lecture on where next and what next for Mr Holovaty – http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/digitalcontent/2008/06/_future_of_journalism_adrian_h.html

And Jemima is quite right about the cult following; I’m certainly a fan. ChicagoCrime was inspired. And he answers his emails; we had a decent conversation on the Knight people this spring as in ‘So what are they like to work with, Adrian…’ Not that it mattered in the end.

But in so much of what he’s doing, I think he’s spot on.

But, for me, he needs to go further; to push on; to go the next, extra mile and re-humanise that content.

Because, for me, what his data-scraping delivers is wonderful, labour-free content; but it’s de-humanised; it’s written in the cold, sterile language of a council report and as we’ve discussed previously, when people step into any future ‘reading room’ of our design, they want warmth, security, humour, tenderness…

Back to that idea – that we need to try a little tenderness as a governing editorial principle. And that’s what I don’t get from EveryBlock; I want the human story behind the newly-noted graffiti.

“It’s a tragedy that beautiful, clean data is compressed into a blob, orientated towards humans. The problem is that it is not orientated towards computers and that’s what we should be doing….”

Computer-generated, fine… computer-hostable, accessible, programmable, updateable… fine, fine, fine. But it has to have a human face. Where’s the real story? Where’s the human story? Re-humanising EveryBlock is, to my mind, where we should be going.

Which, in many ways, is all that the ‘Faces of the Fallen’ does – brilliantly. It literally puts a human face to the red raw data of American’s fallen in Iraq – http://projects.washingtonpost.com/fallen/

It gives me the stories; it delivers the tenderness that I crave; the community that I seek; the same sense of belonging that the parents and friends of that 14-year-old schoolgirl found in gone2soon.

As ever, there is much of interest in Holovaty’s words and deeds.

I have to say I don’t ‘get’ the local ‘news’ site – www.lawrence.com . I don’t see much local ‘news’ as such; just a really, really nasty banner to get your eyeballs round as soon as the home page loads.

But then, maybe, said music festival is the only thing worth talking about right now and I would suspect that the interaction on the restaurant review side of things is probably state of the art.

If I was sat over a mixing bowl throwing bits and bobs into any MyLocalWriter.com ‘cake’ that’s one thing I’d ask of Mr Holovaty – Adrian can I borrow your restaurant reviews, pal?

The other point to note is that our man is disarmingly frank about his future funding; or rather how his vision ever gets to support itself once the initial Knight funding money runs dry.

For now, it appears, that even someone of Adrian Holovaty’s innovative ilk is stuck for an answer; that he had delivered raw, data-driven news write down to every block level – now he has to find a revenue model and mechanism that, likewise, can work at street level.

“There’s a flip side to the Everyblock project: that Holovaty says he doesn’t have a clue about the sustainability of the project. At the moment it is funded by the Knight grant but when that two-year fund runs out, what will happen to the project? “I have no idea. We might give up, or magically start making some money. But we are journalists, not business people.”

And there Adrian and I definitely go our seperate ways; because if we are to have a future as journalists, we have to become business people; we can’t hope for a ‘magical answer’; we have to work it out for ourselves before our former audience disappears over the horizon for good.

Which is why we keep tinkering away with www.addiply.com wondering whether we can’t drill a local advertising network system right down to street level; put it on the corner of EveryBlock.

There is one final point to what Holovaty says and does that I find telling; and, I don’t know how many of the man’s finger-prints are all over www.lawrence.com – perhaps his input was limited to the restaurant section.

But I see an ‘ad gallery’ – what I don’t see, at first glance at least, is the traditional ad box run by you-know-who. Not right down there where the ultra-local eye-balls eye.

Perhaps Adrian Holovaty and friends don’t see a ‘magic’ answer to their business-modelling needs lying in that direction. That they can’t get those numbers to work. That ad model doesn’t make sense – if you get my drift.

And if it doesn’t make sense to them, why should it ever make any sense to the rest of us?