- BRIAN KERSEY/AP
- Adrian Holovaty
The hyperlocal website EveryBlock was shut down Thursday by NBC News. NBC News senior vice president Vivian Schiller told Poynter blogger Jeff Sonderman that EveryBlock was a “wonderful scrappy business but it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy and — like most hyperlocal businesses — was struggling with the business model.”
The good news, I suppose, is that people notice and people are shocked. From Patrick Boylan, one of Chicago’s hyperlocal news pioneers, I got a two-word e-mail, “HOLY COW!” Another EveryBlock regular e-mailing a heads-up told me, “An informal poll in my office showed 100% of those people within ear shot of my desk used and loved EveryBlock. None of us knew the others were using it. They gave no notice . . . just turned it off like Mayor Daley ripping up runways in the middle of the night. Hope you will cover (uncover) what really went down. Somebody at NBC should lose their job — either for shutting it down, or not having the ability to monetize something that was actually working in hyper-local journalism.”