Hyperlocal database journalism

I've already mentioned the debut of Everyblock, the latest effort by Web data guru Adrian Holovaty. Now he's fleshed out some of the work behind the scenes that led to the site's recent launch, in an interview at OJR.

Adrian explains it clearly took some work in the community and on the computer.  And he offers his reasons why we newspaper.commers haven't equaled his efforts.

Holovaty: Unfortunately, there's a lot. In the general case (and "general" means this excludes the newspapers out there who are doing great things online) --

• A lack of technical competence
• A culture so obsessed with daily deadlines that little thought/resources are put into paradigm changes
• A culture that disdains technology and science, particularly math, and, worse, actually takes pride in that
• Red tape
• Legacy systems
• Legacy attitudes
• People who ask "Is this journalism?" ;-)