MSNBC & EveryBlock: What’s It Mean for Local Bloggers
by Matt McGee on Aug 17, 2009 in Industry
There’s been so much interesting hyperlocal-related news lately, and I’ve rarely had time to blog about it. Today, gotta make an exception for the news that MSNBC has acquired EveryBlock. You may recall EveryBlock from previous coverage here on HLB — it’s an aggregator of hyperlocal data that primarily taps into government and other databases for information. But as I wrote last year, EveryBlock also accepts submissions from local blogs, allowing your posts to appear in EveryBlock’s news pages.
What It Means for Local Bloggers
Well, I can’t find anything that specifically addresses if local bloggers can continue to submit content to EveryBlock, but the signs are pretty good that this won’t change. On the EveryBlock blog, founder Adrian Holovaty says that little will change:
We’ll continue to run the first and best microlocal news Web site on the planet, with the same six people, with the same logo and design, with the same everyblock.com domain. MSNBC.com has hired our whole team, and they’ve made it clear to us that we’ll be driving the site’s strategy and implementation, and that our site will remain an independent destination as a community service.
That sounds pretty promising. Even better is what MSNBC’s Cory Bergman posted on his Lost Remote blog about the company’s intentions:
Because I know this will be the first question many of you will ask – what does this mean for local media? One of our first conversations will be how we can share EveryBlock data with local media partners. Our plan is not to compete with the local news ecosystem, but identify ways to reinforce it.
It seems like nothing will change for local bloggers except, perhaps, the possibility of much wider exposure – depending on how MSNBC integrates EveryBlock data into its news coverage. And let’s not forget, too, that Microsoft owns other properties that might benefit from EveryBlock’s hyperlocal data. There’s the Bing search engine and its local/maps tool, and that’s just for starters.
And if you’re interested, there’s a lot of Techmeme discussion about the MSNBC/EveryBlock deal.
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I wonder if they’ll open the site up to a broader range of cities and towns now? That would be great for those of us who live in “bloggy” communities just outside major cities.
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