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I like that metaphor. And to bring us up to date on EveryBlock. Shut down by NBC News because “it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy,” it’s being given a new lease on life by Comcast, which owns NBC News, which owns MSNBC, which acquired EveryBlock in 2009, two years after it was launched by Adrian Holovaty. Chicago Grid reported recently that it’s seen a beta version of the new site, and it looks like the same collection of neighborhood news and data as the old one. (And most new corner restaurants are variations on the old ones.) Chicago Grid said EveryBlock would probably return first to Chicago and then spread to other cities. Its first time around, the site was in 19 cities.
But on another hyperlocal front, AOL is bailing on Patch, the pet project of its CEO, Tim Armstrong. AOL has lost at least $200 million on its national network of hyperlocal news sites, according to this piece by the New York Times‘s David Carr, and over the past several months has laid off hundreds of employees. Given these troubles, it’s funny to read what I had to say about Patch three years ago, when it was new and shiny:
It was an article reporting the closing of the Lincoln Restaurant—which is a neighborhood joint a few doors from the busy intersection of Irving Park, Damen, and Lincoln. Many a night when I’ve found myself in town alone I’ve slid into a booth in the nearly empty dining room, opened my newspaper, plastered butter over the loaf of hot bread that comes with every meal, and whiled away an hour eating Grecian chicken. From the far side of the closed door into the next room there’d be frequent gusts of laughter—that would be the Lincoln Lodge comedy club, holding court.
