 Holovaty, a Ukrainian American, grew up in Naperville, Illinois and attended Naperville North High School.While serving as co-editor of the high school's newspaper, The North Star, a censored article about a faculty member sexually assaulting a student reignited an anti-censorship in the Illinois house of representatives.He graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001 and worked as a web developer/journalist for "The Atlanta Journal-Constitution", "Lawrence Journal-World" and "The Washington Post" before starting EveryBlock, a web startup that provided "microlocal" news, in 2007.