Nextdoor pins stemming inactive users challenge on partnership with local news and journalists
Plus: Detailed mapping of local news provision in the US (and lessons for the UK) + up for an award for The Lead North
Good afternoon,
Welcome to the last of the What I’ve Been Reading digests for a couple of weeks, there’s a last days before school holidays feel in our house as my daughter inches closer to that Friday finish and the long summer hols. We got her school report through and I was as proud as anything at how she was getting on.
Although my wife despaired at this line which read “Connie has enjoyed our topic work this year, especially our local geography unit earlier in the school year. She was able to take the factual knowledge we had learnt and combine this with her own opinions to support arguments on whether local development was a good or bad thing.” Might as well train her up as a Local Democracy Reporter now - watch out Paul Faulkner ;)
Due to family commitments, making space to write something meaningful on two years since I left Reach and striking out on my own has not come to pass. So I shall file that under the ‘get done during the summer hols period’. We’re off to North Wales next week for a family holiday, so hopefully some blissful sunsets to reflect on such things with a beer in hand.
And we’ve just got *that* phone call from nursery about my sun, so here is this week’s rather rushed digest….
Nextdoor social site, looking for a revival, pins hopes on partnership with local news providers - David Bauder, Independent - the hyperlocal social network, lost cats, bins and generally a well-informed street group is saying ‘come on in’ to local news providers. Links from news titles have always been in Nextdoor but this piece points out how 75 per cent of their usership is inactive.
So while big headline numbers look great, digging into the data suggests they have an issue with attracting people into the app - for a variety of reasons. Enter highly engaged local superstars, i.e. journalists - if there’s one thing good local journalism does, it gets people talking. An interesting, and I think smart, move from Nextdoor. EalingNews is one of the UK titles who are in the partnership and you can read more from them on it.
Local Journalist Index - Rebuild Local News and Muckrack - this is a tactic with data often used for how many doctors per head of population or other services. But what about for local journalists? That’s what has been attempted in the States by Muck Rack (who scrape what journalists are writing into profiles) and the ReBuildLocalNews project. This feels like a fairly robust study - and draws some comparisons to the much criticised local news map in the UK last year which focused more on media ownership than journalists per head of population (but that may be because data is more readily available in the US?)
What stood out to me is how fast-growing places often have a pressure-point over a lack of reporters, which makes sense when you think about it as likely large new housing developments have sprung up around smaller towns which have maybe weekly legacy news title or only a small one-person band independent title covering it. There’s also the challenge of big cities getting in-depth coverage in their suburbs or districts, which is something that is a challenge here in the UK too and correlates across both the Rebuild Local news and PINF reports.
The Lead North up for a national journalism awards - Press Gazette’s Future of Media Awards - and the and finally if you’ll indulge me is a project we’ve been working on as Alma since late 2023 is up for an award at the Press Gazette Future of Media Awards. The work we’ve been doing to build a new set of newsletter-led journalism launches focused on beyond the bright lights in the North of England, with superb journalism from Luke, Leigh, Jamie and Andrew (and others) in
, , , and twice-a-week is shortlisted in the Best Journalism-Based Newsletters of 2025 (Specialist/Regional) category. The email about the shortlisting dropped on my birthday last week, which was nice. Well done to everyone involved and good luck to everyone on the shortlist, some fellow Substacks including , and on there.And that’s a wrap on this week’s digest, as mentioned be a couple of weeks break before I am back in your inbox. Fingers crossed for some sunshine.
Many thanks for reading and all the comments and contributions.
Keep going.
Ed