Nextdoor Gets Update With Local News Partnerships

If you are a Nextdoor user, you know it is the place to ask for plumber recommendations and to air your grievances about the new traffic light in town.

But Nextdoor wants to be so much more. Co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia told AP News: “There should be enough value that we are creating for neighbors that they feel like they need to open up Nextdoor every single day. And that isn’t the case today.”

To that end, Nextdoor announced its “most consequential redesign of its core product to date.” A refresh of the site and app will focus on three pillars: Alerts, News, and Faves.

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Alerts promises “to deliver real-time updates on everything from daily weather and traffic to critical moments like power outages, severe storms, and wildfires.” Faves will utilize AI to deliver quick answers to questions like, “What is the best place to hike with kids?” according to the release.

In a big push to become a source of reliable information, the News section will utilize content from 3,500 local news publications in the U.S., UK, and Canada. Collectively, the app will publish 50,000 local news stories per week. “Trusted outlets are now reaching neighbors directly through the platform, bringing community-focused journalism to neighborhoods everywhere,” read the release.

“We thought in our early days that neighbors would take over, almost as citizen journalists or local reporters,” Tolia said to AP. “I think we’ve come to the conclusion that neighbors can only do so much.”

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Tolia revealed that while Nextdoor has 100 million registered users, only about 25 million log in once a week. With these improvements, Nextdoor is hoping to boost that number, which could provide an ancillary boost for the struggling local news market. Tim Franklin, head of the Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern, told the AP that this could provide a lifeline to sites getting killed by Google’s AI answers.

“If Nextdoor is another vessel to get readers to news sites, and local news sites in particular,” Franklin said, “It would come at a real moment of vulnerability for local news organizations and would be a real opportunity.”

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