That curates egg of a social platform Nextdoor is branching into news reporting.
For those who don’t know, the platform is a community-focused platform that looks to bring people together to share updates about their area.
While it has the whiff of a Facebook group about it Nextdoor users add their address to allow the app to bring them only local messages.
Now with added news
In a new development, Nextdoor has gone through a redesign and they have now in the process of adding a number of news providers to people’s feed.
In the past, Nextdoor has not allowed news organisations the chance to create a page in the way they can create a Facebook page, for example. As a result, when news links have been shared this has been done on an ad-hoc basis by users themselves.
UK Press Gazette talks of Nextdoor have added news as an option to their existing site. Checking this today this hasn’t reached my corner of the internet. However, as the West Midlands does not have a news partnership it makes sense not to update until they do.
Globally, 3,500 news sources have been added. However, an extensive search has revealed only three so far announced in the UK.
In July 2025, they are:
London – The Standard (Lebedev)
Kent – Kent Messenger (Iliffe)
Cambridgeshire – Cambridge Independent (Iliffe)
Lincolnshire – Grantham Journal (Iliffe)
In the weeks after launch, Nextdoor say that 80 local news pages have been added. I’d be keen to list them if and when they are available.
Nextdoor’s three new areas on the app
According to a Nextdoor press release there will now be three areas… News, Alerts and Faves.
For news, “trusted outlets are now reaching neighbours directly through the platform, bringing community-focused local journalism to neighborhoods everywhere,” the press release says. From the confirmed list that’s not strictly true just yet.
For alerts, the statement says the alerts will be from council, police or fire and rescue and will allow conversation during critical events. Alerts are already available as partnership agreement, as far as I know.
If that’s Nextdoor trying to push into the highly competitive WhatsApp group and Facebook group crisis comms landscape then good luck.
For Faves, interestingly Nextdoor refers to 30 per cent of the platform already being local service recommendations. Ai will be used to give a summary response on the best coffee shop based on seven years of data. Great to be faster but so much can change in seven years which can make the answers inaccurate. This is launching in the US first before being pushed to the UK at a ‘later stage.’
What this means for public sector comms
While the idea sounds great, an initial launch of three titles will not uproot many trees just yet. Starting small before rolling out makes sense. But The Standard in London has shown no interest in covering local news in London boroughs for decades so it’s also not likely to make much difference.
Three of the 30 Iliffe titles also won’t make that much difference. The Standard in London doesn’t cover community news. However, to cut some slack, this is a toe in the water as opposed to a wholesale reinvention.
But if the scheme is successful, this could increase visible scrutiny of the public sector which has shown to be healthy for the democratic process. It would also mean that media relations becomes a bit more important day-to-day as opposed to in an emergency.
What Nextdoor already is
One of the great things about Nextdoor is the partnership agreement they can offer to public sector organisations. If they sign-up their content is pushed straight into people’s feed. This is an absolute God send to an organisation struggling with algorithms.
Not only that, but people can send messages ward-by-ward as well as town, city or county and that’s powerful.
What Nextdoor is not so good at
I mentioned the Curate’s Egg at the top of this blog. In a nutshell, the downside is the data on who uses the platform isn’t great. Ofcom in a single line described Nextdoor’s audience as being over 55s. But Ofcom don’t drill into the platform’s audience in the way they do with other platforms.
That’s not Nextdoor’s problem, of course.
There is some data that appears to show that more than 10 per cent of over 55s get their local updates on local government from Nextdoor. This is sizable without being gamechanging and the figures lag behind their main rival which are Facebook groups.
Nextdoor are not particularly great at sharing numbers, either. The cynic in me says this is because the numbers are not for shouting about. But as a consultant this does leave me stuck when advising on what channels to use.
After publication, Nextdoor got in touch to say that as a publicly traded company, most of our stats were global. However, they claim 10 million users, with one in four in the UK and one in three households in London.
The only acid test for public sector people is to experiment and keep a close eye on numbers.
The development with news providers means that the public sector may soon more widely have a conflicting voice. It’s not clear if comms teams will be able to even see them in their partnership agreement dashboards.
One to keep an eye on.
I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.
Creative commons credit: By Hampstead High Street, 1988 by Ben Brooksbank, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130693367
This has been updated after publication to clarify that Nextdoor have updated their current platform rather than build a new one and also updating the press release link. I’ve also updated the 80 news platforms available.
