Nextdoor social site, looking for a revival, pins hopes on partnership
with local news providers
[July 15, 2025] By
DAVID BAUDER
NEW YORK (AP) — Nextdoor, the social media site that aims to create
connections among neighbors, is trying to shake off an uneven past and a
nagging sense it is being underutilized. How? It is turning to
professional journalists for help.
The company announced a partnership Tuesday with more than 3,500 local
news providers who will regularly contribute material to the app. As
part of a redesign, it is also expanding its ability to alert users
about bad weather, power outages and other dangers, along with using AI
to improve recommendations for restaurants, services and local points of
interest.
“There should be enough value that we are creating for neighbors that
they feel like they need to open up Nextdoor every single day,” said
Nirav Tolia, the company's co-founder and CEO. “And that isn't the case
today.”
The potential for Nextdoor to help itself and journalists at the same
time is most intriguing.
Nextdoor is carrying portions of local news stories from providers in
the area where the user lives. If people want to learn more, a link to
the news site is included. At launch, Nextdoor says it has more than
50,000 news stories available, representing just over three-quarters of
the app's “neighborhoods.”
A future for news that never arrived
When Nextdoor began in 2011, the local news industry was in the early
stages of a freefall that continues today. The number of journalists in
the U.S. dropped from 40 per 100,000 residents in 2002 to slightly more
than eight today, according to a study issued this month by Muck Rack
and Rebuild Local News. Nearly a third of the nation's counties have no
full-time journalist.
Into this tumult came an app with a promising premise and
infrastructure, perhaps a template for local news of the future. Its
users — Nextdoor likes to call them “neighbors” — were organized into
more than 200,000 distinct neighborhoods, with the ability to start
conversations once shared over back fences: Do you know a reliable
babysitter? What's that building going up down the street? Who serves
the best burger?
Yet Nextdoor's developers knew technology, not the news business. They
didn't see a role for professional journalists at the outset.
“We thought in our early days that neighbors would take over, almost as
citizen journalists or local reporters,” Tolia said. “I think we've come
to the conclusion that neighbors can only do so much.”
Even worse, the site became a magnet for racists and cranks, the kind of
neighbors you try to avoid. Nextdoor became so filled with suspicion —
why is a person of a different color or nationality walking down the
street? — that its moderators had to spend considerable time rooting out
racist posts and changing rules to prevent them.
For some users, the negatives outweighed the positives.
“Nextdoor has been a valuable resource for my family,” Ralinda Harvey
Smith, a woman from Santa Monica, Calif., wrote in the Los Angeles Times
in 2020. “I found a nanny share for my kids on Nextdoor. When I posted
looking for a mechanic to replace my car headlight, a neighbor offered
to change it free of charge. When the pandemic struck and disinfectant
wipes were impossible to come by, a woman on Nextdoor DM'd me offering
to leave some on her porch.”
“Yet I've long seen remnants of racism across the site that have left me
with a bad feeling not only about the app, but the city I love,” Smith
wrote. That made her log on less frequently.
Trying to make Nextdoor essential for users
Whatever the reasons, enough users consider Nextdoor inessential that
its leaders were compelled to make the changes being announced now. The
site has 100 million registered users, but only about 25 million are on
the site at least once a week, Tolia said. Nextdoor, which went public
in 2021 to attract a new round of financing, wants to see them more
often.
[to top of second column] |
A Nextdoor sign is shown on a window at an office in San Francisco
on May 11, 2016. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
 Nextdoor hired a former executive at
The New York Times, Georg Petschnigg, as its chief design officer to
oversee the changes.
The company said its surveys found users wanted to
know more about what was going on in their communities beyond the
utilitarian information. Other social networks are similarly
bringing in more outside material, Tolia said. “When you rely on
user-generated content, it’s kind of unpredictable in terms of
quality, timeliness and relevance,” he said.
“If I were in their shoes, I’d be doing this. I don’t know why they
didn’t do it sooner, but that’s for them to answer and not me,” said
Chuck Todd, the former “Meet the Press” moderator who has taken an
interest in local news since leaving NBC. Semafor this spring
speculated Todd might be interested in buying Nextdoor. Todd
wouldn’t discuss that.
He is waiting to see if Nextdoor has a real commitment to news or
just to reaching more eyeballs.
“It’s an opportunity to do the one thing that Facebook could have
done but chose not to,” Todd said. “You don’t want this to go down
the road of just trying to get traffic for traffic’s sake, because
that’s what happened to Facebook after it went public.”
The irony of engaging with professional journalists isn't lost.
“It’s like what is old is new again,” said Sam Cholke, manager of
distribution and audience growth for the Institute for Nonprofit
News. Its hundreds of members include the Texas Tribune, the Plateau
Daily News in Highlands, N.C., and the Daily Yonder in Whitesburg,
Kentucky.
Several of its participating news organizations are joining with
Nextdoor, and “my hope is that our members see significant benefits
from it,” Cholke said.
Hoping for mutually beneficial relationship
The local news industry continues to suffer from the same problems
that have led to its downfall the past two decades: a dwindling
number of readers and advertisers. An offhand comment by Tolia —
about how people used to pick up “a piece of dead tree” from their
driveways to get their news — speaks to fading prospects.
Facebook's deemphasis of news on its platform and Google’s
increasing use of AI at the expense of referrals to news articles
are adding to the death spiral, said Tim Franklin, head of the
Medill Local News Initiative at Northwestern.
“If Nextdoor is another vessel to get readers to news sites, and
local news sites in particular, it would come at a real moment of
vulnerability for local news organizations and would be a real
opportunity,” said Franklin, whose worry is that relying on third
parties is unpredictable.
Josh Schneps, who runs a series of local news operations in New York
City and Long Island, like the Flushing Times and Park Slope
Courier, has already had material appear on Nextdoor in a soft
launch and is seeing an increase in traffic to the sites.
“I feel like media is in a state of evolution and there's no
playbook,” Schneps said. “My goal is to get our content in front of
as many people as possible. I'm more than happy to be the guinea
pig” for Nextdoor, he said.
An industry — and a company — both need help. Maybe they can help
each other.
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