Nextdoor social site, looking for a revival, pins hopes on partnership with local news providers

By DAVID BAUDER NEW YORK AP Nextdoor the social media site that aims to create connections among neighbors is trying to shake off an uneven past and a nagging sense it is being underutilized How It is turning to professional journalists for help Related Articles From No Nukes to Nuclear Now The progressive resource flip Capital One Walmart A look at selected of the consumer cases dropped by the CFPB under Trump Bulk US stocks fall but Nvidia keeps Wall Street near records JPMorgan posts strong second quarter numbers though Dimon warns of tariff geopolitical pitfall When do big beautiful megabill changes go into effect The company revealed a partnership Tuesday with more than local news providers who will regularly contribute material to the app As part of a redesign it is also expanding its ability to alert users about bad weather power outages and other dangers along with using AI to improve recommendations for restaurants services and local points of interest There should be enough value that we are creating for neighbors that they feel like they need to open up Nextdoor every single day mentioned Nirav Tolia the company s co-founder and CEO And that isn t the scenario nowadays The foreseen for Nextdoor to help itself and journalists at the same time is the greater part intriguing Nextdoor is carrying portions of local news stories from providers in the area where the user lives If people want to learn more a link to the news site is included At launch Nextdoor says it has more than news stories available representing just over three-quarters of the app s neighborhoods A future for news that never arrived When Nextdoor began in the local news industry was in the early stages of a freefall that continues in the present day The number of journalists in the U S dropped from per residents in to slightly more than eight in the modern day according to a review issued this month by Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News Nearly a third of the nation s counties have no full-time journalist Into this tumult came an app with a promising premise and infrastructure perhaps a template for local news of the future Its users Nextdoor likes to call them neighbors were organized into more than distinct neighborhoods with the ability to start conversations once shared over back fences Do you know a reliable babysitter What s that building going up down the street Who serves the best burger Yet Nextdoor s developers knew system not the news business They didn t see a role for professional journalists at the outset FILE Nextdoor CEO Nirav Tolia poses for photos at his office in San Francisco on May AP Photo Jeff Chiu File We thought in our early days that neighbors would take over almost as citizen journalists or local reporters Tolia announced I think we ve come to the conclusion that neighbors can only do so much Even worse the site became a magnet for racists and cranks the kind of neighbors you try to avoid Nextdoor became so filled with suspicion why is a person of a different color or nationality walking down the street that its moderators had to spend considerable time rooting out racist posts and changing rules to prevent them For selected users the negatives outweighed the positives Nextdoor has been a valuable deposit for my family Ralinda Harvey Smith a woman from Santa Monica Calif wrote in the Los Angeles Times in I revealed a nanny share for my kids on Nextdoor When I posted looking for a mechanic to replace my car headlight a neighbor offered to change it free of charge When the pandemic struck and disinfectant wipes were impossible to come by a woman on Nextdoor DM d me offering to leave specific on her porch Yet I ve long seen remnants of racism across the site that have left me with a bad feeling not only about the app but the city I love Smith wrote That made her log on less frequently Trying to make Nextdoor essential for users Whatever the reasons enough users consider Nextdoor inessential that its leaders were compelled to make the changes being released now The site has million registered users but only about million are on the site at least once a week Tolia disclosed Nextdoor which went constituents in to attract a new round of financing wants to see them more often Nextdoor hired a former executive at The New York Times Georg Petschnigg as its chief design officer to oversee the changes The company stated its surveys ascertained users sought to know more about what was going on in their communities beyond the utilitarian information Other social networks are similarly bringing in more outside material Tolia mentioned When you rely on user-generated content it s kind of unpredictable in terms of quality timeliness and relevance he mentioned If I were in their shoes I d be doing this I don t know why they didn t do it sooner but that s for them to answer and not me explained Chuck Todd the former Meet the Press moderator who has taken an interest in local news since leaving NBC Semafor this spring speculated Todd might be interested in buying Nextdoor Todd wouldn t discuss that He is waiting to see if Nextdoor has a real commitment to news or just to reaching more eyeballs It s an opportunity to do the one thing that Facebook could have done but chose not to Todd commented You don t want this to go down the road of just trying to get traffic for traffic s sake because that s what happened to Facebook after it went population The irony of engaging with professional journalists isn t lost It s like what is old is new again stated Sam Cholke manager of distribution and audience increase for the Institute for Nonprofit News Its hundreds of members include the Texas Tribune the Plateau Daily News in Highlands N C and the Daily Yonder in Whitesburg Kentucky Several of its participating news organizations are joining with Nextdoor and my hope is that our members see considerable benefits from it Cholke stated Hoping for mutually beneficial relationship The local news industry continues to suffer from the same problems that have led to its downfall the past two decades a dwindling number of readers and advertisers An offhand comment by Tolia about how people used to pick up a piece of dead tree from their driveways to get their news speaks to fading prospects FILE Cars and pedestrians move along crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco on Thursday July AP Photo Jeff Chiu File Facebook s deemphasis of news on its platform and Google s increasing use of AI at the expense of referrals to news articles are adding to the death spiral reported Tim Franklin head of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern If Nextdoor is another vessel to get readers to news sites and local news sites in particular it would come at a real moment of vulnerability for local news organizations and would be a real opportunity stated Franklin whose worry is that relying on third parties is unpredictable Josh Schneps who runs a series of local news operations in New York City and Long Island like the Flushing Times and Park Slope Courier has already had material appear on Nextdoor in a soft launch and is seeing an increase in traffic to the sites I feel like media is in a state of evolution and there s no playbook Schneps commented My goal is to get our content in front of as multiple people as feasible I m more than happy to be the guinea pig for Nextdoor he noted An industry and a company both need help Maybe they can help each other David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP Follow him at http x com dbauder and https bsky app profile dbauder bsky social