Gawker: valleywag, everyblock

The Trouble with Taking Charity

Ryan Tate — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 15:22:26 EDT

Adrian Holovaty has sold his hyperlocal news startup to MSNBC.com, allowing the programmer to cash out and keep his staff employed. For most entrepreneurs that would be unalloyed good news. But Holovaty isn't just any entrepreneur. Just ask his critics.

The j-school graduate (pictured) is on a mission to save journalism, and his venture, EveryBlock, was in turn funded to the tune of $1.1 million by a grant from the philanthropic Knight Founation, which was hoping Holovaty would "make it easy for people to learn more about life around them." After two years, Holovaty open sourced his code and had accumulated a daily audience estimated at 14,000.

That's not good enough, says CUNY assistant professor Christopher Anderson, who writes that MSNBC has skimmed off the value of a project "developed by common labor;" Anderson is upset in part because it's not clear whether EveryBlock's code will remain openly available. NYU Local publisher Cody Brown has called for more transparency around the deal.

These sorts of critiques would be unimaginable around an acquisition involving privately held companies funded by stock and venture capital. But they're perfectly predictable when nonprofit money and promises of public benefit are involved. The Knight Foundation has already been through it once, with MTV.

America's newspapers should remember these headaches; as they seek government favors and mull nonprofit status, they'll find they have as much to learn from Holovaty's business story as from his technology.

(Disclosure: I applied for, and ultimately did not receive, a Knight Foundation grant one year after Holovaty.)

(Pic: Matt Biddulph)

Newspaper savior Adrian Holovaty's little Google hitch

Owen Thomas — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:00:00 EDT

We would never imply that Adrian Holovaty, the supremely talented journalist-programmer who's now the CEO of local-news startup EveryBlock, is being cagey or dishonest about his talks with Google, which continued as recently as last weekend. Our theory: He's just shy and bashful, and doesn't like talking about what a hot commodity he is! Sources close to Google confirm that they are very interested in bringing Holovaty, the creator of a set of programming tools called Django, into the Googleplex. There are not one but two hitches, though.

First, there are the conditions of his grant from the Knight Foundation, which is currently funding EveryBlock. The Knight Foundation used to have strong ties with the now-defunct Knight-Ridder newspaper chain; some of those ties now reach beyond the corporate grave, a tipster explains:

Part of the deal with the Knight grant was that Adrian will turn over the sites to the local papers after the year (or however long the money lasts) is over. That's why the sites include second-tier cities like Philly and Charlotte, former Knight Ridder papers. Of course, that may just be true in those cities, so Google could still buy New York, etc.

To be clear, this is just newsroom scuttlebutt, but it's a compelling theory.

The other hitch? Google's reputation for killing startups by neglect. A tipster tells us Holovaty is making a series of "asks" to make sure that doesn't happen to EveryBlock — and that he's reluctant to admit to the talks, lest his unusual demands be misinterpreted. In that light, the secrecy makes sense. It's certainly how an entrepreneur would act. But perhaps not how a journalist would.

Newspaper-killing Google aims to hire newspaper-saving programmer

Owen Thomas — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

Adrian Holovaty is going to save journalism, darn it, if the industry likes it or not. And he may soon be doing it at Google. The search engine has long suffered from a tin ear in its relations with writers and editors — the people who create the content it indexes. Holovaty gained fame for linking up Google Maps with local crime statistics to create chicagocrime.org, one of the first mapping mashups. And he gained cred in the journalism world by melding programming and reportage at the Washington Post. Most recently, he's been pursuing the same goal at his own local-news startup, EveryBlock, which he funded by winning a contest held by the Knight Foundation. And now Google wants to buy Holovaty's startup, we hear. Holovaty says that he's had no conversations with Google, but did have lunch with a friend at Google's campus last week, which he stresses was "a social matter." The effort to buy his venture — there's no "deal," Holovaty tells us — has hit some kind of unusual hitch. It's not clear what the holdup is.

Google's such a natural home for Holovaty, it's hard not to see the deal going through. Besides his journalism work, Holovaty's also the creator of Django, a set of tools for coding in Python, a programming language that's strongly preferred at the Googleplex. (Guido Van Rossum, the creator of Python, already works at Google.)

If Holovaty does land at Google, expect him to transform Google News into a site that's more of a database of information than a news archive. He's long been critical of the newspaper industry's focus on stories, rather than information. A police-blotter news report, for example, is not as useful as a website which displays crimes on a map by type and date. If Holovaty's going to save journalism, he may have to do it at a search engine that many believe is killing the newspaper business. They can't say he didn't warn them.