The sand is flying these days in Seattle, that crowded sandbox for hyperlocal experimentation online.
First, there was the announcement of Next Door Media’s partnership with the University of Washington Daily on a new neighborhood news site. Now comes word that an independent iPhone app called SeattleCrime has been downloaded more than 4,000 times.
SeattleCrime.com was started by Jonah Spangenthal-Lee, who left the Stranger last fall and teamed with Justin Carder and Scott Durham of Instivate/Neighborlogs to launch the site. (Carder also runs the Capitol Hill Seattle blog, Durham the Central District News blog.) In a short few months, Spangenthal-Lee has grown quite a following so Carder and Durham partnered with him and Purple Robots to develop an iPhone app.
“Newspapers aren’t exactly hiring in droves these days, but I didn’t want to stop doing what I was doing,” Spangenthal-Lee said. “I really enjoy reporting, and there was an obvious gap in coverage of the local crime beat, so I started the site so I could keep busy, keep people informed about what’s going on in the city, keep in contact with my sources, and drive my still-employed reporter friends crazy.”
The result is a slick user interface and timely data. (There were apparently two assaults within blocks of my office on Capitol Hill as I’m writing this. Maybe I’ll stay in for lunch today.) The crime reports on the app and the site come from the Seattle Fire Department’s 911 log (which automatically update), police reports, Spangenthal-Lee’s own reporting, and info from local blogs. Those reports now include contributions from users as the iPhone app has the ability to send reports to the site.
“Everything that we’re doing with SeattleCrime is also about developing really smart solutions to services we can combine again and again in new and interesting — and hopefully profitable! — ways,” Carder told me via email. “Lots of cool things come next. First, we’re going to take the Crime framework and make it work extremely well with the local community news space. We’re hoping to develop a system for producing high-value mobile apps for hyperlocal news sites. We’re also going to explore higher scale methods to do this so that any local news and info site can afford to have a mobile app that is more than just an RSS reader. There’s no reason to build these things if the tech isn’t shaped around the mobile experience and the service isn’t location aware and alive that way.”
With apps from Everyblock and Outside.In available, plus other local media apps like KING-5 and the Seattle Times, local news consumers have plenty to choose from. Local media companies, of course, are notorious for developing fairly bland apps that do little more than repurpose RSS feeds and don’t take advantage of geolocation. Everyblock and Outside.In (among others) try to use geolocation to provide the most relevant information depending on the exact location of the user. In my periodic tests, both apps are less than perfect, something that hasn’t escaped Carder.
“We believe highly in doing this in a way where we have solid local partners involved to call bullshit on bad geolocation, etc. and help give the service the high quality news component we believe it needs to have. We’re also looking for opportunities to take everything we’ve learned with the SeattleCrime app and use that framework and code to bring a similar service to other markets,” Carder said.
Carder also said they are planning to develop and release Android versions, too. It’s an ambitious approach for independent news. It’s a smart strategy and, so far, smart execution.