Hyperlocal news business EveryBlock, an early pioneer in data-driven news aggregation, has been shut down by parent NBC News, it announced today.

EveryBlock launched in late 2007 with the promise of aggregating community news you’d want to know about. It was acquired by MSNBC in 2009 and later went under NBC’s control after MSNBC.com became fully owned by NBC.

The company says that “massive” changes happening in the news industry (most likely the inability to make much money from advertising) was the reason it shut down. It writes in a blog post today:

We’re sorry to report that EveryBlock has closed its doors.

It’s no secret that the news industry is in the midst of a massive change. Within the world of neighborhood news there’s an exciting pace of innovation yet increasing challenges to building a profitable business. Though EveryBlock has been able to build an engaged community over the years, we’re faced with the decision to wrap things up.

Thank you for having let us play a role in how you get your neighborhood news. Thanks for the contributions, for the questions, and for allowing us to connect you to each other, in many cases to make great things happen in your community. Along the way, we hope we’ve helped you be a better neighbor.

While EveryBlock could have potentially been saved by selling it off or asking for community donations (something like what Andrew Sullivan did or a Kickstarter campaign), NBC News says it did not see any other option for EveryBlock besides simply shutting it down.

“I understand that the EveryBlock community is disappointed,” Vivian Schiller, SVP and chief digital officer of NBC News, told Poynter. “So are we. We looked at various options to keep this going, but none of them were viable. It was a tough call to make.”

Disappointed may be an understatement. The post announcing the site’s closing currently has more than 530 comments. The highest-rated comment is a complaint about how the community received no warning about the shutdown, leaving them with no ability to save information or stay in touch with other members of the community:

Thanks for just turning it off with zero warning or notice. Thanks for letting us get contact information for friends we had made on the site. Thanks for letting us copy information and threads that we wanted to keep.

This was handled extremely poorly.

Closed sign photo via FrancescoCorticchia /Shutterstock

Carlos Espinal is partner at Seedcamp, a European micro seed fund for internet technology companies.

Despite any clouds looming over the macro-economic climate, Europe’s startups and investors (and increasingly those from further afield) gather together once a year to attend the LeWeb conference in Paris.

Part of what makes LeWeb so great is the multitude of events that occur on the periphery of the actual conference. With our very own Seedcamp event taking place a few days earlier, Le Camping’s social event at the Paris Stock Exchange, Startup Bus having a get together, and the many private dinners held by companies, tech industry celebs, and investors alike, there is no shortage of opportunities to meet new and influential people as well as up and coming tech startups.

If anything, it is this peripheral networking during LeWeb ‘week’ that makes it increasingly one of the most influential conferences globally. And it is oftentimes the casual conversations that occur on the tails of a great talk between the attendees that the new ideas will take hold for the next year.

I had the chance to catch up with a few friends who attended — Chipper Boulas (Boulas Ventures), Mike Sigal (Guidewire Group), Francois Tison (360 Capital), Scott Sage (DFJ Esprit), Maximilian Claussen (Earlybird), and Marek Kapturkiewicz (Innovation Nest) — to discuss what the future may bring in terms of ideas born out of discussions and talks at LeWeb. These are the four clearest social/mobile trends we expect to see over the next year:

1. Innovation linked to smartphone proliferation – With the ongoing penetration of mobile devices into emerging economies, particularly smartphones, more innovative mobile services will spawn, particularly regarding payments and hyper local targeting.

2. Increased use of groups for social filtering — People are increasingly pressed for time and saturated with social media (George Colony, CEO of Forrester, mentioned that people’s use of social media is only second, in terms of time spent, to childcare, implying we are in a social bubble and people are reaching a saturation point in the use of their time). As a result, companies, content creators and advertisers will struggle to make relevant connections with individuals. However, the rise of social filtering based on the awareness of an individual’s affinity groups while traversing the web (for example, something like Google+ circles) may solve the relevancy and targeting issues associated with trying to connect with an individual without knowledge of the social contexts in which the individual operates.

3. Continued evolution of micro location and hyperlocal applications – While in the past micro location (being able to track a person’s location to a high degree of accuracy whether indoors or out) has been difficult to do, Google’s location head, Marisa Meyer, spoke about how the indoor mapping features of Google Maps for Mobile 6.0 will help spawn greater use of hyperlocal apps and services to provide advertising opportunities for brands and agencies but also more relevant search results for users.

The greater use of APIs such as those from Google and Foursquare will also continue to generate more locally aware applications.

4. Financial technology innovation will speed up — Financial technologies will see wider adoption and democratization. With service providers such as the Currency Cloud, present at LeWeb, and other disruptive players such as Transferwise (Seedcamp Company) and Kantox making inroads into how companies deal with foreign-exchange risk and costs. Additionally, how consumers interface with their financial institutions via their mobile will continue to evolve.

It will be interesting to look back on this list at next year’s LeWeb to see how far and how fast these technologies have moved and to speculate on a new batch of emerging trends over the conference’s great (and free) Nespresso.

AOL has gotten a lot of ink

Few have heard of Clarity Digital Group, the owner of Examiner.com and a property of Denver-based The Anschutz Company. But that may change as news of its success spreads. Started in the spring of 2008, Examiner.com now has 19 million unique visitors a month and 54 million page views a month for its local news and reviews.

“There is a lot of talk about AOL and how they are doing cover local communities with Patch,” said Leonard Brody, president of Clarity Digital. “We feel like we are already there.”

While there are some professional news journalists producing material, most of its is produced by 55,000 amateur writers who know the local neighborhoods that they’re writing about. It’s applying the concept of crowdsourcing, tapping the wisdom of the masses, to journalism — though in Examiner.com’s case, the amateur writers are all paid based on ad revenues and measures of engagement with their stories.

The rush is on to claim the turf of hyperlocal news and advertising, where billions of dollars are at stake. Newspapers are dying, yet no one has come to replace them in local online markets. Examiner.com deliberately avoids the role of being an online newspaper, whose role is more like being the watchdog of a community. Rather, Brody sees his company’s role more as reinventing the town square.

“We want to connect those who are passionate about their own community,” he said in an interview.

While national and global audiences have been aggregated by the likes of CNN, Yahoo, and Google, nobody really dominates hyper local, which is the opposite of a mass market and which is defined by its neighborhood focus where the content is created by locals and consumed by locals. As mentioned, billions of dollars are spent in hyperlocal venues, but big corporate advertisers find that the customers hard to reach. That’s because it’s like trying to become a millionaire by picking up all the pennies in a field.

One big difference is that newspapers hire journalists while Examiner.com hires examiners. Examiners are local experts, usually not journalists, who are passionate about subjects such as pets. They are not the conscience of the community, but a reflection of it, Brody said. They could post about local dog parks or write restaurant reviews. They are paid based on a complex formula that includes how many page views they get, how many views come from local readers, and how much users are engaged with their posts, said Rick Blair, chief executive of Clarity Digital. Most of the examiners do not make a living on their posts, but view the work as an avocation. For instance, a former New York Times writer is an examiner focused on cycling in New York City.

“We give the examiners a platform for their passion and they find that very rewarding,” Blair said. “The more exposure and recognition they get, the hapier they are.”

It seems to be working. The company started with just six markets covered by 100 examiners. Clarity Digital got funding from telecom billionaire Phil Anschutz, who owns the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington Examiner. (Aside from having an investor in common, Examiner.com is not related to those news properties, which operate on their own domain names.)

With Anschutz’s backing, it was able to patiently add new markets. Now the company serves 238 markets in the U.S. and Canada. Some 150 cities were added this year.

In Los Angeles alone, the company has 2,000 “examiners,” its name for its local writers. That’s larger than the journalist staff of the Los Angeles Times. During the recent Los Angeles fires, one examiner who had firefighting skills was blogging and fighting the fire at the same time.

About 35 percent to 45 percent of the network’s examiners are active in a given month. On average, they write six or seven articles a month. Over time, that has added up. Examiners produce 3,500 articles a day, and the archive of articles is 1.5 million on everything from where to find parking in Chicago to good places to eat in Los Angeles. Blair said the company’s core competency is recruiting good examiners and grooming them.

While these writers aren’t doing investigative journalism, they aren’t paid shills either, Blair said. He actually approached major advertisers to see if they wanted to pay writers to produce articles about their goods and they said they wanted genuine work. Advertisers may sponsor campaigns such as a major series on pets, but the work is not paid advertorial. Advertisers can sponsor an examiner if they want a certain kind of topic covered. The ideal examiner post will produce water cooler talk, not straight hard news.

While the pay isn’t huge (and Examiner.com officials wouldn’t provide details), Examiner.com is now getting 10,000 applications a month fo examiners. It vets each application and accepts about 40 percent of them, after looking at sample stories and writing skills (and doing criminal background checks). The writers can focus on any of 200 categories or subcategories. the writers can look at a dashboard and see how much money they have made in a month.

Examiner.com is making money through local ads, examiner sponsorships, and campaigns that are targeted via Examiner Connect, which combines content creation with social media and search engine optimization techniques. The company did a campaign with pet food maker Iams related to pet adoption. That resulted in much better search results for searchers on the words “pet adoption” and “Iams.” On such campaigns, the competition isn’t as fierce.

Even as it adds examiners, the costs expand only as more revenue comes in, Blair said.

Examiner.com has about 100 employees on staff.