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Holovaty quits Washington Post to build local site tools

Journalist/programmer [and Web 2.0 rock star] Adrian Holovaty is leaving washingtonpost.com, where he has been editor of editorial innovations since September 2005, to form a new web business.

Hovolaty’s new project is called EveryBlock, and he today picked up a US$1.1 million grant to kick it off.

The money will come from the Knight Foundation News Challenge awards which describes the project as follows:

To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block.

Holovaty honed his skills on the highly-respected Lawrence [Kansas] Journal-World website and its equally impressive events site lawrence.com. He also built chicagocrime.org, a site that mashes crime stats from police databases with Google maps.

About his time at the Post, Holovaty says:

Washingtonpost.com is the best mainstream news website, with equal attention devoted to preserving quality journalism and inventing new forms thereof. I’m grateful, proud and honored to have been associated with it.

Now, it’s time to start a new chapter.