Nextdoor is emphasizing local news in its big redesign

Nextdoor, the social media app for people who like complaining about their neighborhoods (often with a dash of racism), is trying to reinvent itself — and it’s turning to local journalism for help.

In a redesign announced today, Nextdoor announced that it is partnering with “more than 3,500 local news providers who will regularly contribute material to the app,” according to the AP. The app will also be expanding its ability to send out alerts about things like extreme weather, power outages, and more.

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

It’s interesting to see Nextdoor moving in what seems to be the opposite direction of other major social networks, which have been de-emphasizing news in favor of user-generated posts. The company hired Georg Petschnigg, a former New York Times executive, as its chief design officer in October of last year, and the main theme of the changes — which will include a rotating carousel of news stories at the top of the landing page, an alerts map populated by information from official government sources, news stories, and user posts, and (of course) an AI chatbot — seems to be making the app a trustworthy source of hyper-local information.

As Mia Sato points out in The Verge, Nextdoor was inspired in part by the way people used its platform and Watch Duty, a wildfire-tracking app, during the fires that hit Los Angeles earlier this year.

“We’re going to recommit to hyperlocal. We are going to focus on utility,” Tolia told Sato. “We don’t want to be the place where people are just bitching about what they don’t like about the neighborhood.”

The 3,500 news providers in the Nextdoor partnership are scattered across the U.S., U.K., and Canada; according to the AP, several are members of the Institute for Nonprofit News, though it doesn’t name any. The Verge writes that the partnership is currently unpaid and is mostly a way for the publications to get more traffic and engagement from a new user base, so it remains to be seen exactly how beneficial the partnership will be. Still, I’m cautiously optimistic. Nextdoor’s users are, to say the least, passionate about their neighborhoods, and there’s a good chance that passion could extend to their neighborhood’s news sources.