‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/technology/start-ups/13hyperlocal.html

Placeblogger, a Bryght/Raincity Studios site, gets a mention at the beginning in a New York times article.

Just as some cities’ newspapers sputter, a handful of Web sites emerge to cull local content from government data, blogs and news media.

One hurdle is the need for reliable, quality content. The information on many of these sites can still appear woefully incomplete. Crime reports on EveryBlock, for example, are short on details of what happened. Links to professionally written news articles on Outside.in are mixed with trivial and sometimes irrelevant blog posts. That raises the question of what these hyperlocal sites will do if newspapers, a main source of credible information, go out of business. “They rely on pulling data from other sources, so they really can’t function if news organizations disappear,” said Steve Outing, who writes about online media for Editor & Publisher Online. But many hyperlocal entrepreneurs say they are counting on a proliferation of blogs and small local journalism start-ups to keep providing content.

EveryBlock.com is an experimental news Web site that provides information at a "microlocal" level — by neighborhood or city block. It was funded by a grant from Knight Foundation, which requires the site's backend code to be open-sourced. Here is the code.

oooh, I was waiting for this! would love to play around with this for oly.