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The demand from the community is extremely high, even so we still have not found a way to fund the citizen authors that volunteer for the love of it.

Google pays the bandwidth, but we need a solution for the labor.

Still searching and wondering if a “free” price with a donation button would result in help from those that appreciate the original content.

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I agree that information is information and news has to be information plus something else. Context is definitely necessary but I’m not sure it’s sufficient.

There’s a lot of things that go into a traditional definition of “news” and a lot of non-news-related stuff that has to happen to make a traditional newspaper. The funny pages are a traditional component of newspapers but I don’t think there are too many people who would call Andy Capp news. The same goes for the guy who puts the newspaper on your doorstep — part of the process, but not part of what we’d call “news”.

Like you say on your FAQ, whether it is or isn’t news is largely a semantic argument that is probably best left to academics. Only problem is, it seems like most academics involved in this discussion right now are interested in figuring out clever gimmicks to fund the ancien regime instead of starting with a clean slate, figuring out what news consumers really want and how best to deliver it to them.

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It’s definitely news, just as Google Alerts are news — EveryBlock notifies you whenever there’s something new in your neighborhood. It just has a fundamentally different form than what news organizations have done in the past. My background is in journalism, and I very much see EveryBlock as a work of journalism.

Also, we add a significant amount of context to the raw data we get, so I’ve gotta call you out on that. I spoke with David Cohn (yes, the same one who posted a comment in this thread :-) ) about this, here: http://www.digidave.org/adventures_in_freelancing/2009/01/a-slew-of-recent-interviews-with-interesting-people.html

But regarding the model that Jeffrey mentioned in this post — yes, we’re indeed interested in exploring it. Feel free to get in touch with me (holovaty.com/contact) if you have any ideas on working together.

Adrian @ EveryBlock

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What you are seeing on spot.us is still just about 1/4th of what we want and have already designed.

We hope to be in phase two soon – where each pitch has a blog, so the reporting process can happen in public and the reporters can keep reporting.

Eventually we hope to fund beats as well as stories.

But as I always say. Crawl, walk, run and then fly. That is the natural order of things.

I’d say right now we are still crawling but trying to stand up and walk. If we can do that – we have every intention of funding beats.

Wish us luck!

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Their feeding data, some of which is timely, but not really news, since it’s not on context or perspective.

But it came to mind because essentially what you’re suggesting is the need for a market-maker — someone to bring together people who want a service (local, neighborhood news) and people who can provide the service. They have a platform that (appears to be) is designed to manage the tagging of information geographically and granularly enough that it could, conceivably, work at the neighborhood level.

“What can readers find on Everyblock?…
News articles and blog entries — major newspapers, community weeklies, TV and radio news stations, local specialty publications and local blogs. We do the work of classifying articles by geography, so you can easily find the mainstream media coverage near particular locations. ”

As a dilletante, it seems like they could either host blogs and recruit writers that would cover beats, but the more important part, whether they host blogs or look for other blogs that cover beats, would be a consistent tagging convention that allows for stories to be geo-coded.

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