EveryBlock President: Economics of Hyperlocal Editorial ‘Broken’

Street Fight reporting:
Between Patch’s beta redesign, NextDoor’s big funding round in the spring, and the Guardian’s hyperlocal news project, N0tice, continuing to expand in the U.K., the hyperlocal news landscape appears to be converging on the idea that hyperlocal information needs to be social. Meanwhile, adding to noise in the local content space, the Journatic scandal in the early summer thrust a set of new hyperlocal plays into the spotlight, raising questions about the sustainability of models which looked to data and technology to replace the heavy costs of editorial content. While the trend line appears to be pointing to a model founded in social, the role of data in editorial, and user-generated content remains very much up for debate.
EveryBlock, one of the earliest entrants in the hyperlocal data space, rebooted in 2011 after being bought by MSNBC.com in 2009. The pivot shifted the product’s focus away from its roots in data aggregation toward a more interactive product centered largely around user-generated content. This past summer saw some major changes for EveryBlock’s management — NBC Universal acquired MSNBC.com; meanwhile, EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty announced he was leaving the company in late August.
We caught up with EveryBlock’s president, Brian Addison (who will be appearing at the Street Fight Summit in two weeks), to discuss the state of the space, and the role of data, editorial and user-generated content in the future of hyperlocal news.
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While data was at the core of our product when EveryBlock first launched, we found, over time, that it kind of has a niche appeal. In a way, we need to return to the question of what consumer need are we trying to address with this data? How much value do we as a reader place with that type of information? With EveryBlock, some of our users value that, almost raw, data. And it drives more value if you put some editorial around it. But for us, data still plays an important role in what we do but we’ve shifted our focus from the aggregation and organization of that data to a set of community features that have driven our growth from our redesign about a year and a half ago.
http://streetfightmag.com/2012/07/02/journatic-ceo-accepts-blame-for-blockshoppers-fake-bylines/