New York (AP) – NextDoor, a social media site, which aims to create connections between neighbors, is trying to get rid of an uneven past and a stinging sense that it is used insufficiently. How? He addresses professional journalists for help.
The company has announced a partnership on Tuesday with over 3500 local news providers who will regularly contribute to the application. As part of a redesign, it also expands its ability to alert consumers about bad weather, power supply and other dangers, along with the use of AI to improve recommendations for restaurants, services and local interesting points.
“There must be enough value that we create for neighbors that they feel that they have to open NextDoor every day,” says Nizle Tolia, co -founder and CEO of the company. “And that’s not the case today.”
NextDoor’s potential to help himself and journalists are at the same time most intriguing.
NextDoor carries parts of local news stories from suppliers in the area where the consumer lives. If people want to learn more, a link to the news site is included. At the launch of the Nextdoor, it says more than 50,000 news stories, representing just over three quarters of the “neighborhoods of the app”, are available.
Future for news that never arrived
When NextDoor started in 2011, the local news industry was in the early stages of free fall, which continues today. The number of journalists in the United States has dropped from 40 to 100,000 inhabitants in 2002 to just over eight today, according to a study issued this month by Muck Rack and restoring local news. Almost a third of the nation’s counties do not have a full -time journalist.
This boom came with a promising prerequisite and infrastructure, perhaps a local news template for the future. Its users – Nextdoor love to call them “neighbors” – were organized in more than 200,000 different neighborhoods, with the ability to start conversations after being shared through the rear fences: do you know a reliable babysitter? What is this building that walks down the street? Who serves the best burger?
Still, the developers of NextDoor knew the technology, not the news business. At first they did not see a role for professional journalists.
“In our early days, we thought that neighbors would take up, almost as civilian journalists or local reporters,” Toli said. “I think we came to the conclusion that neighbors can only do so much.”
Even worse, the site has become a magnet for racists and designs, the type of neighbors you are trying to avoid. NextDoor became so suspicious – why a person of different colors or nationality walks down the street? – that its moderators had to spend considerable time eradicating racist posts and changing the rules to prevent them.
For some users, negatives exceed the positives.
“NextDoor has been a Valuable Resource for My Family,” Ralinda Harvey Smith, a Woman from Santa Monica, Calif., Wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2020. ”I found a nanny share for Looking for a mechanic to replace my car headlight, a Neighbor ( Your porch. “
“Still, I’ve seen the remains of racism for a long time throughout the site, which left me with a bad feeling not only for the application, but also in the city I love,” Smith writes. This made her embark on her more often.
Trying to make NextDoor essential for users
Whatever the reasons, enough users consider NextDoor insignificant that its leaders were forced to make the changes that have been announced now. The site has 100 million registered users, but only about 25 million are on the site at least once a week, Toli said. NextDoor, who became public in 2021 to attract a new round of funding, wants to see them more often.
NEXTDOOR hired a former CEO at New York Times, Georg Petschnigg, as CEO of design to monitor the changes.
The company said its research has found that users want to know more about what is happening in their communities out of utility. Other social networks similarly attract more external materials, Toli said. “When you rely on content -generated content, it is something unpredictable in terms of quality, timeliness and relevance,” he said.
“If I were in their shoes, I would have done it. I don’t know why they didn’t do it earlier, but it’s for them to answer, not me,” said Chuck Todd, the former moderator of “Meet the Press,” who was interested in local news after leaving the NBC. Semafor this spring speculates that Todd may be interested in buying Nextdoor. Todd would not discuss this.
He is waiting to see if NextDoor has a real commitment to the news or just to reach more eyeballs.
“It’s an opportunity to do one thing Facebook could do, but chose not to do it,” Todd said. “You don’t want to go on the way, just try to get traffic because of traffic because it happened with Facebook after it became public.”
The irony of engaging with professional journalists is not lost.
“It’s like what’s old, it’s new again,” says Sam Cholke, a distribution and growth manager for the Non -Profit News Institute. Its hundreds of members include the Texas Tribune, Daily Plateau Daily News in Highlands, NC and Daily Yonder in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Several of his participating news organizations are joining NextDoor and “I hope our members see significant benefits from this,” Cholke said.
Hoping for a mutual relationship
The local news industry continues to suffer from the same problems that have led to it over the last two decades: reducing the number of readers and advertisers. Comment on Toli – How people took a “Dead Tree” from their alleys to get their news – talks about fading prospects.
Facebook’s Deephasis of News on his platform and Google’s growing AI use at the expense of the recommendations to news articles add to the death spiral, said Tim Franklin, head of the Local News Initiative in the Northwest.
“If NextDoor is another ship to make readers be on news sites and more special news sites, it will come to a real moment of vulnerability to local news organizations and it would be a real opportunity,” said Franklin, whose concern is that the reading of third parties is unhappy.
Josh Juneps, who runs a series of local news operations in New York and Long Island, such as the Flushing Times and Park Slope Courier, has already had a NextDoor material in a soft launch and is observing an increase in site traffic.
“I feel that the media is in a state of evolution and there is no book to play,” Schneps said. “My goal is to get my content over as many people as possible. I’m more than happy to be a guinea pig” for Nextdoor, “he said.
Industry – and company – both need help. Maybe they can help themselves.
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David Boder writes about the intersection of the media and the entertainment for the app. Follow it on http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.