Facebook, Twitter, Snap, etc are all too saturated with content that's scoped so globally that local content has a tough time penetrating through. Nextdoor on the other hand is built for local and has the perfect geographic and privacy model to take things really really local in a way that others can't.
They'll be able to make money in a way that independent local newspapers can't, but they'll also hopefully be able to drive demand enough to incentivize local journalists, reporters and even super engaged citizens.
Nextdoor doesn't fill this use-case super well today, but I think they can pull it off if they choose to focus on it. They certainly have all the right ingredients.
Recently our city council was proposing a special assessment against each property in our neighborhood of about 100 houses to rebuild our roads. The project was estimated to cost each tax payer $50,000 in a neighborhood of houses where the values range from $150,000-$250,000. Yes, they wanted to take $50,000 from each home, in addition to normal property taxes that should pay for infrastructure, to rebuild our road.
One of the councilman’s wife (someone that most would think is informed) was posting on Nextdoor claiming the special assessment was something the residents of the neighborhood would vote on and that residents should vote yes on the special assessment to beautify their neighborhood and that anyone who votes no clearly doesn’t care about their neighborhood. The problem with this is the special assessment clauses in the city ordinances do not provide a mechanism for residents to vote. It’s purely a vote of city council members. So here we have a city councilman’s spouse spreading falsehoods about how city government works. I reported the posts and countered them both with citations of ordinances and recorded questions about the process at city council hearings but because she has a large following and more ‘influence’ in the Nextdoor sphere I was labeled a liar and crazy person that doesn’t care about his neighborhood. Nextdoor did nothing to stop the dis-information.
I’m aware it’s only one anecdote but I find it hard to believe that Nextdoor can become any reliable source of local news when it’s so easy to post and spread straight up falsehoods on the platform.
most of these american exurban developments of 50 - 250 homes, with no other meaningful town or tax base, down winding side roads and cul-de-sacs, got built starting in the 80s and really ramping up in the 90s. they are all 40 - 60 year infrastructure financial time bombs.
the math never worked, it was just built on a long enough horizon that everybody got to assume it would be someone elses problem.
It's exactly this kind of assertion, combined with followup attacks which is degrading public discourse in 2019.
I reported the posts and countered them both with citations of ordinances and recorded questions about the process at city council hearings but because she has a large following and more ‘influence’ in the Nextdoor sphere I was labeled a liar and crazy person that doesn’t care about his neighborhood.
Fits the general pattern to a T. Might makes right. I have the most followers, therefore I am right. I have control of the forum, therefore I am right. How is it the general population doesn't have a basic grasp of epistemology? In 2019, it seems like fully half of the population thinks might makes right is intellectually worthy!
What if you wrote up a pamphlet and started talking to people in person?
As of now the plan is to put out a millage for vote across the whole city to cover several city infrastructure projects.
The real problem is that Nextdoor has no incentive to fix it, in fact they have a disincentive. Their business model seeks posts that spread like wildfire, pitchfork-ism and the like.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19734501
I guess if Nextdoor wanted to get in on that, they could hire journalists, but it is a reasonable outlay of money if you want to scale it, and something they don't currently do. Journalists need editors, and people to manage them who know how to hire the good ones, and probably other stuff that someone like me unfamiliar with the industry isn't even thinking of.
This is not something that can be 'crowdsourced'. Any citizen that sits through some portion of a city council meeting is probably there because they're interested in - and opinionated about - some local issue. This makes them less than ideal 'reporters'.
About the only thing I've found with Nextdoor is that many of my neighbors are scared of strangers and everybody hates how everybody else drives.
An interesting twist is that they seem to be involved with senior-citizen organizations. Maybe older folks are more likely to get involved?
As much as I dislike this German cloning model, and find it sad as there's a lot of real creativity in Berlin, I think a service like this might stand a better chance in a country with strong laws around privacy and slander.
[0]: https://nebenan.de/about (in German)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet#Controversy
[2]: https://www.ksta.de/wirtschaft/nebenan-de-und-wirnachbarn-co...
[Edit: link formatting]
Newspapers can do fine when people read them. Ad sales, sponsorships, etc provide more than enough revenue for a local paper that has a at least a moderate readership. The reason newspapers are failing is because they aren't finding that moderate readership - people aren't reading them. And this is the exact same reason that ad sales/revenue are declining. So it's not like if you externally fund a newspaper, you fix the problem. You simply end up with a well funded paper that nobody reads.
And ultimately I see no way to save newspapers. Why would I read one handful of journalists' takes on events that happened 24+ hours ago, when I could instead see the views of not only countless journalists but even real people and specialists takes on issues, as they unfold? And as the article mentions the times of finding jobs or local sales in the newspaper is completely gone as well. To a degree this will also lead to a paradoxical decline of online outlets. They, like local papers, need loyal viewers to survive. But there's no inherent reason to offer loyalty to any given news outlet in era of the internet. This is, in my opinion, why most media has gone full-on partisan and op-ed type stuff. It tries to turn the news into entertainment to draw a recurring audience like a weekday sitcom in times past. Suffice to say this is not a viable long term strategy - fanaticism invariably destroys itself in the long run.
There's usually not much value in knowing about what's going on right now outside of your locality, and breaking news is too bent on emotional manipulation and being first, even if it means being inaccurate. Junk food for your brain.
City council meetings can be lived-streamed, auto-transcribed, and their agenda can be posted. People will still of course offer their opinions on the subject on their social medias. We don't need newspapers to do this.
And most importantly they follow up. The meeting is the start. Ihe rest is follow through. If the council are approving a special zoning permit, they go out and talk to neighbors, or the contractors previous special work, etc.
To say that you can just get some text is a bit like suggesting that wget is a good replacement for a web browser. Sure it does some of the stuff, but it isn't the real deal.
One of the most important functions of the news is to pick and chose which information is important and relevant and to present that information in an understandable way. To fulfill that function they do not even have to go digging for extra information (though that certainly helps and can also, crucially, help in actually picking what’s important and relevant).
I think somehow dreaming up a local newspaper that does the same in-depth reporting as, say, the New York Times is just dumb and and doesn’t really help someone arguing in favor of local journalism.
Just summarizing the most important points that were discussed during a council meeting is actually plenty good enough. You could do better, but even just that provides quite a lot of value.
A number of years back, my town had a very good local newspaper that was sort of someone's labor of love but they became ill and, now, no newspaper. I basically have no knowledge of what's going on in town unless it rises to the level of importance where it gets coverage beyond the town lines. To be sure, I'm not really interested in most of what goes on but it would be nice to know.
What I need is an accurate and neutral summary of the things I should care about so when it comes time to vote in a couple years I can decide if I want to keep the current government or not.
Accurate and neutral is hard. Nobody is unbiased. The decision to cover/not cover something is both important and biased. Every project has pros-cons. The very first one is cost vs value: if you don't do the project you don't spend some money and taxes go down leaving more money for residents to do their own thing with, but they don't get the benefit of the project.
Most of what I see online is a quote - probably taken out of context - that makes the someone person look bad. I don't care if a politician is a good speaker, I care if the ultimate policy is good and this is a complex question.
Interestingly Eye is very slim and only published fortnightly, which reflects the work involved in doing the job properly. And they are very seldom wrong.
Or that didn't happen and mismanagement goes unnoticed for much longer.
Some of that is budgetary, but a lot of it is that a lot of politicians don't actually have an interest in being held accountable, so you need someone to go down there and do it.
Besides, how many people are going to read a full meeting transcript every month? Very few, and typically only those motivated and thus biased by what's going on. You need a summary for a broad audience and you certainly can't trust those running the meetings to make one.
Want to cast the goings on, all of them, of your local council meetings into darkness? Have them do exactly what you just described without any journalists around to catch it.
This is absolutely the number 1 reason the major news organizations don't want to bundle up, and in the case of the top 5 (NYT, WaPo, FT, Guardian), works. Interestingly the second reason is brand. Nobody wants brand dilution from being considered in a "pool" with other publications, because it will reduce their power to charge more for their product in ads and subscription. While small publications actually do want solutions like this, generally the large publications with readership are even more upset to be lumped in with the small publications than they are to be lumped in with their competitors.
One solution which I saw but wasn't worth my company's time to explore was finding a bundle of niche publications willing to work together on a shared content-for-pay solution and had a loyal readership willing to pay, and growing outwards from that seed. But that's a very uphill battle.
It's not a new idea and has been tried 100s of times. We tried it just a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038820
Changing behavior is possible but will require major cooperation and money to do so, at the scale of both Facebook and Google working together to change things. Maybe that'll happen someday but I just don't see it.
So it goes two ways, citizens can wish for the news/content they want to see and content creators don't have to guess anymore what the people want to see.
I made it a bit like a social network where every user has an individual wish page so good reporters can build up a good reputation.
Feedback would be great, what do you think? Is there anything you would like to see on the platform?
They have a couple of titles. They really need to link up with the large local networks though.
But in the end, big companies who own the smartphone experience, such as Apple and Google will probably own the biggest news/content platforms.
But something like that will only happen when attractiveness for publications is maximised, which requires, amongst other things, that the platform avoids consumer facing lock-in or even just branding, because that would make publications (rightly) fear that they hand over whatever pre-existing digital subscriptions they already have to an exploitative intermediary. This in turn pretty much rules out the VC model for starting the platform, since eventually becoming exploitative is a required ingredient of the risk equation. But I see no reason why this could not work as a cooperative, because all the platform marketing would be directed at potential members. Consumer marketing, something in which a cooperative would tend to be inferior to a metrics-driven VC project (by a wide margin I suspect), would be left entirely to publications, who subsequently get to "own" the subscriptions they pulled in. Important design parameters would be the ratio between pooled and unpooled fees and the exact rules about weigh and how much content member publications would be allowed to keep exclusive to their direct subscribers. Outside of implementation, the biggest challenge would be to convince publications that few people would ever subscribe directly to multiple channels (how many people had now than one daily newspaper?) and that therefore, the content made available to subscribers of their peers would not cannibalize potential direct subscriptions very much.
Would also need to devise some way to get out of the coop, or structure it so that the members feel confident that it won't paint them into a terrible corner.
I'm not the right person to build this, it's mostly a BD problem (and I have a very long to-do list anyway), but I hope someone takes a stab at doing it right. Seems like various people have tried to do it as a more traditional startup, but I think the danger to the publications is probably too great with that structure, which would make it much harder to get buy in.
I feel like setting this up to watch your local government (provided they post the minutes online, which maybe should be required now) would only take a few lines of shell script.
Sometimes I think that the arrangement of local governments makes more sense for the days of horses and telegrams than it does today.
You just reinvented journalists, because it doesn't really matter if they're in the room or not. It's the picking through hours and hours of meetings and making something meaningful from those pickings, and maybe talking to some people outside the room too.
And as nice as it is to think that technology is the answer, it already isn't. All meetings could be livestreamed online very cheaply but very few are. It's going to be a long time before automatic transcription technology has any kind of impact. At least part of this is because many politicians don't want to be held accountable, so they're not about to help these efforts.
The big problem at the moment, as I understood things, actually is that opposition is not doing its job by publicly calling out BS when it sees it at the local governance level.
We may want a human in there to verify and edit but it would reduce costs significantly.
Do you, though? Can't a computer do that better than a human, what with machine learning and the like?
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/05/study-when-local-news...
And it's one that requires money to solve, because to cover local politics well, you need someone who sits through the local city council meetings, with their hours of discussion of things like 'sign ordinances' to write up a summary, or maybe bring attention to something that they're spending a lot of money on.