Resource: Community News Sites
- Knight Citizen News Network
- has a “things we like” feature that highlights specific tools and best practices for community and hyper-local Web sites. Lots of very specific ideas and examples here rather than a broad formula for a site.
- Village Soup
- operates multiple Web sites that are highly local and feature news, blogs, discussion and voting. See the main site for links to the local community sties. A Knight News Challenge winner, Village Soup is expected to make the code used to develop its sites public in 2009 so other site developers can use it and modify it to build sites. (This is called open source code.)
- EveryBlock
- is a Knight News Challenge project that offers news and information at the city block level in a dozen American cities. EveryBlock has developed a program that scrapes the Web fore news and other data of interest, including crime reports, want ads, building permits and restaurant ratings.
EveryBlock has made public the code on which it is based so developers of other projects can use it and adapt it to their needs. (everyblock.com/code) EveryBlock may also sell hosted packages. In the meantime, you can check out EveryBlock in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Phildelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington, D.C.