At last week’s Online News Association conference in New Orleans, a team of executives from Nextdoor delivered a keynote speech that focused on the collapse of the country’s local news industry and their new announcement that they hope will help save it: local news partnerships.
“It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” Kelsey Grady, Nextdoor’s head of global communications told Gazetteer SF. “We want to bring great content to our neighbors on Nextdoor, and publications need more ways to distribute their great local news.”
The San Francisco-based geolocated social networking app announced the partnerships in July and has now brought on more than 3,500 local news outlets around the country. These are publishers of all shapes and sizes, whose headlines will be viewable in Nextdoor’s app — although this is news to some of their news partners.
At the ONA conference, the Nextdoor team estimated that 50 to 60 percent of “known local news” sources are now on Nextdoor. In San Francisco, Nextdoor’s partnerships include the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, Mission Local, SFist, and ABC7 News, though some of these outlets seem to be more involved with their Nextdoor partnerships than others. KQED, for example, confirmed they’ve been publishing content as a business page on the app since 2017, long before they converted to a news partner as a part of the new rollout.
On the other hand, editors at Mission Local and SFist were not aware of the partnership until our newsroom reached out to ask if they’d seen increased traffic coming from Nextdoor.
Representatives from Nextdoor did not respond to Gazetteer SF’s request for comment.
In the app, users can only see headlines, subheadings, and one featured photo, which Nextdoor syndicates using RSS feeds. If a user wants to read the full article, the post links out to the actual news site, where users may or may not hit a paywall. How porous a news partner wants to make their paywall, Grady said, is up to them.
Still, pulling any content from news sites onto the app without their knowledge in an attempt to send traffic back their way would be another well-intentioned fumble from the company.
For years now, Nextdoor has struggled with its reputation as the platform of choice for curmudgeons, racists, and other nosy neighbors sharing reports of so-called “suspicious” behavior in their communities. Of course, this sort of posting was antithetical to Nextdoor’s original mission, which was — as it is with most social media companies — to bring people together; instead, it had transferred the worst parts of IRL neighborhood life onto people’s phones. That, combined with a general sense that the platform was inessential to daily life, has steadily driven down the app’s user base since at least 2020.
Over the past year, Nextdoor has rebranded, redesigning its user interface and announcing the news partnership rollout, which the keynote framed as a flagship feature.
Local news certainly can use the help. Since 2005, more than a third of local newsrooms across the country have shuttered operations, according to an annual report on the state of local news out of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. More than 7,000 local journalism jobs vanished between 2022 and 2023, and news deserts — counties without a single local news source — are rapidly spreading across the US.
In theory, the newsrooms that remain should want to utilize every tool at their disposal to deliver news to potential new readers. Nextdoor’s user base may have declined, but they still have some 45 million people checking their app at least once a week.
Still in the early stages of this new strategy, Grady said Nextdoor’s business development team is largely making the first move, reaching out to specific publishers they thought would make a good fit for the program as well as partnering with news networks like Axios Local, the Institute for Nonprofit News, and Patch, but newsrooms who hear about the program are free to get on board of their own volition. “If you’re in an area where the best local news is a one-man newsroom, we’re welcoming them onto the platform,” Grady said.
The partnerships are not paid for by either Nextdoor or the newsrooms, Grady said. Nextdoor is free for publishers to join and, so far, Nextdoor does not have plans to support their existing news partners or attract new ones with any sort of stipend or profit-sharing model.
That means the main benefit of the partnerships is the potential to reach more eyeballs — and that means scrolling. Users can find articles from news sources, which are marked as “local publisher,” embedded in their feeds alongside posts from users in their neighborhood and sponsored content from advertisers.
Grady declined to share metrics on how much new traffic Nextdoor has driven to local news sites.
Introducing external content onto the app also raises the question of moderation. Grady noted that Nextdoor’s neighborhood operations team reviews all new publishers that join the app to verify users only receive content from “trusted, legit publications” and not so-called “pink slime news”: low-quality, often AI-generated slop masquerading as local news. Considering that AI-generated content has even gotten past the (declining number of) editors at respected sites like Wired and SFGate, screening at the publisher level may not be enough.
Grady explained that Nextdoor is using AI to screen every piece of content that comes through the news RSS feeds before anything gets posted on the app. “We have certain things we don’t want on Nextdoor — national politics, anything that’s too violent in nature, things of that sort we don’t allow in the feed,” Grady said.
The moderating algorithm, of course, is vague. Nextdoor’s publisher guidelines detail that content cannot “focus on national or international politics,” “be an obituary for a non-public persona,” “depict, describe, or condone any excessive harm to people,” or “contain editorials or opinion pieces,” among other rules, but it’s nearly impossible to know exactly how the AI will determine what’s acceptable for the platform based on these guidelines alone. Whether Nextdoor users will be informed when a local newsroom covers a school shooting and provides context on national gun regulation, or writes about controversial political speakers visiting local college campuses is unclear.
At the ONA conference, the Nextdoor keynote outlined the high-level vision for the feature. The majority of the speech focused on the more existential problem of news deserts, the counties so journalistically hollowed out that there are not even “one-man newsrooms.” The presentation suggested that Nextdoor’s ability to monitor coverage density at the neighborhood level, the app can help “publishers and communities address coverage gaps before they become entrenched problems.”
If that doesn’t work, they might need to get creative.
“Right now we’re focused on getting all the publishers on board, and then we’ll see where the gaps are and come up with strategies to fill in those gaps,” Grady said. “We’re thinking about other creative things we can do down the line. Maybe we can hire a news team at Nextdoor that’s writing content in these areas that don’t have a good local partner. We’re not there yet, but we’re thinking about those things.”
