Farewell EveryBlock, We Hardly Knew Ye…

EveryBlock, the data-driven hyperlocal community news site is no more. Corporate owner NBC, who never figured out how to make money with it, has sent it off into the ether. Jeff Sonderman of the Poynter Institute has the story:

NBC News has shut down EveryBlock, one of the early pioneers of data-driven hyperlocal community news and information.

The decision took effect today. Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and chief digital officer of NBC News, told me today by email: “[EveryBlock] is 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.”

Given how crowded the hyper-local space is, between sites like Patch and the many native hyper-local websites in big cities like LA, New York and San Francisco it doesn’t actually surprise me that EveryBlock has gone the way of the dodo. That NBC News couldn’t mine the site’s data tools and community to create a great news product doesn’t surprise me either.

It’s NBC. They peacock up everything.