Local news? It's Nextdoor
The neighborhood gossip sheet wants to be your local news outlet
Nextdoor sounded like a good idea when it started, akin to the notion of running the government like a business (bad idea, poorly executed). But it quickly turned into a sideshow of neighbors peering out through their Ring cameras and speculating on why that white van was in the neighborhood again.
It used to be said that strangers who watched the 7 p.m. TV news would be afraid to venture out of their hotel rooms for fear of being raped, abducted, murdered, or all three. Now, Nextdoor hopes to bring that home for real. Folks will be trembling inside their suburban fortresses, waiting fearfully for the next edition of Nextdoor to fill them in all the horrors they missed.
Many towns and cities are now news deserts, meaning that they don’t have their own newspaper and may not have local radio or TV stations doing any meaningful news. Yes, we know, Congress has cut off funds for National Public Radio which, according to NPR, is a disaster unequalled in modern times.
The truth, of course, is that federal funding is only part of public broadcasting’s support, which mostly comes from corporate and foundation underwriting and from listeners and viewers “just like you.”
And let’s face it: public broadcasting isn’t exactly anybody’s idea of intensive local journalism. You may get some rip-and-read radio news but not much more in most locales.
So along comes Nextdoor, sniffing out a route that might lead it to a more prominent position, something a bit more elevated than a community swap shop and DIY chronicler of petty crime.
Although it presents itself as a down-home slapdash site that just happened to take root in Anytown, USA, Nextdoor is actually a publicly traded company (NYSE: KIND) that operates in all 50 states and in the UK, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Denmark.
It is sort of a latter-day version of Craigslist, which back in the early days of the Web, sucked up all the classified ads and put newspapers on the fast track to bankruptcy. It’s basically hoping to finish the job, ripping any remaining meat off the bones and leaving newspapers to dry up and blow away.
This is esentially what Google News, Apple News and plenty of other pirate sites do. In the news business, it’s called “aggregation,” meaning that you steal — or aggregate — stories from wherever you can find them and jam them together into your branded site, keeping the eyeballs and ad dollars they attract. The advantage to Google et. al. is that the news they swipe doesn’t cost them anything.
Nextdoor is taking aggregation even farther, by inviting consumers to write their own news. This is likely to be about as interesting as watching an ant hill, although we’re assured that Nextdoor will do a few deals with legitiimate publications to reuse some of their warmed-over material.
As a business venture, Nextdoor and the aggregators are pretty attractive. They don’t have to pay reporters, photographers, editors and all those other pesky people who produce newspapers, newscasts and whatnot. And now that advertising is pretty much a do-it-yourself business — where advertisers click on a few options and pony up their credit card — there’s no huge sales expense involved.
If you ponder it for a minute, Nextdoor is in a pretty good position — well-situated, as they say in biz school — to move on this market like a bitch, as our President might put it. It already has the sites, the name and the audience, such as it is. A little tweaking and it just might amount to something someday.
Those of an optimistic bent might say that this is taking journalism back to its roots. After all, Ben Franklin was primarily a printer who did a little news to keep the ink from drying out. And Thomas Paine was a sorehead who would probably have done well with an AM radio talk show, or maybe a podcast.
It has always, of course, been true that you can’t believe everything you read in the paper. We’re about to scale that up to previously unimagined heights. Or depths.