If your school is in New York City, Chicago or San Francisco, check this out.
EveryBlock is a new Website that lets you search for news, road closings, restaurant inspections and loads of other information by ZiP code, neighborhood, even by block on a city street. Read more in today’s Al’s Morning Meeting column, including an interview with site founder Adrian Holovaty.
The site crawls the internet for information on those three major cities, so if your school is there, start looking for ways to use it. Look for restaurant inspections on places your students go for lunch or dinner or lattes. Find crime reports for the neighborhood around your school. Look for story ideas for your newspaper or yearbook or links of useful real-time information for your Website.
The site launched today. I looked up University High near the University of Chicago, Wayne Brasler’s school, and found links to a variety of crimes (assault, battery, petty theft) and a review of a nearby restaurant, the University of Chicago Pub. Could there be stories there? Sure — what if the theft occurred at school, but the student newspaper didn’t know? This one didn’t occur at the high school, but the site would alert you if an incident was reported at school. What if the assault occurred at a popular student hangout? Could be a story.
Look it over, and if you have ideas on how schools could use EveryBlock, register as a user of Poynter Online so you can post feedback here. Or email your thoughts to me. What a great opportunity for intensely local reporting on our school communities.
