EveryBlock is a site owned by Comcast that collects and sorts local news data and hosts community conversation on a block-by-block level.

The site ran from 2008 to 2013 — owned most of that time by msnbc.com — before closing and being relaunched in 2014 by Comcast.

The site was launched in 2008 by Chicago-based journalist and developer Adrian Holovaty with a $1.1 million Knight News Challenge grant based on Holovaty’s 2005 map mashup experiment Chicagocrime.org. It initially covered New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, but now covers more than 15 U.S. cities. At its peak, EveryBlock had seven full-time staff members. Holovaty left the site in August 2012.

In August 2009, two months after its Knight grant expired, EveryBlock was bought by msnbc.com. The site was shut down abruptly in February 2013 by NBC, which had taken control of EveryBlock when NBC took full ownership of msnbc.com the previous year. NBC’s owner, Comcast, relaunched the site in January 2014 with a Chicago site. It added a Philadelphia site later that year.

The site has included information ranging from restaurant inspections to crime reports to building permits, as well as news articles and blog entries.

EveryBlock was required to make its source code public as terms of its Knight grant. It released its source code in June 2009, at the end of its grant period, though the code has not been publicly updated. The quick acquisition by a for-profit company and the decision not to update the publicly available source code raised some questions about the appropriateness of the use of the Knight funds.

In 2010, the Knight Foundation awarded several grants totaling about $500,000 to fund OpenBlock, a open source re-implementation of EveryBlock.