The Sad, Sudden End of EveryBlock

The hyperlocal community news platform EveryBlock launched five years ago with the hunch that people wanted – and needed – a place to talk with their neighbors about neighborhood news, particularly when struggling traditional media outlets were seldom offering that opportunity. Perhaps the best evidence that people truly were eager to connect in this way emerged Thursday when NBC announced it was shutting the whole thing down: 533 commenters (as of this writing) swiftly turned to the site to console each other over its demise.

The site, originally created in 2008 with a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant, billed itself at the time as “a geographic filter — a ‘news feed’ for your neighborhood, or, yes, even your block.” And it went on to creatively blend “news” by many definitions, pulling in civic data like crime stats, articles from alt weeklies and radio stations, Flickr photos and restaurant reviews. The site was acquired in 2009 by MSNBC.com, which was acquired last year by NBC News. Word that the media giant was shutting it down came unexpectedly Thursday, with a simple announcement on EveryBlock’s homepage. Just a sampling of the bitter reaction there: