GOING NEXT DOOR

Nextdoor (nextdoor.com) claims to be “the neighborhood hub for trusted connections and the exchange of helpful information, goods, and services.” Prior to the start of the coronavirus crisis, it seemed not unlike a local online garage sale combined with over-the-fence discussions of neighborhood crime and other developments. However, in the nascent stages of the crisis, as panic-buying and hoarding led to a nationwide shortage of toilet paper, Nextdoor became a vital source of critical information, as local stores and helpful neighbors would post when new shipments arrived. It can also be a source of little-known local news in preliminary stages and serve as “a window in to daily life around the country,” claims Ian Bogost in The Atlantic’ s July/August 2018 issue (“What Petty Nextdoor Posts Reveal About America”; theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/nextdoor-american-communities/561746).

According to information Bogost gleaned from Steve Wymer, Nextdoor’s vice president of policy, 30% of Nextdoor discussions involve service requests and recommendations, 20% involve real estate, and 10% revolve around crime and safety. More than 180,000 communities, including 90% of the 25 largest cities in the U.S., have a presence on Nextdoor, making it reasonably representative of the nation as a whole. The resulting conversations may be a possible litmus test to gauge the breadth of informal discussion in America.

Is this useful for local community research? In order to join a Nextdoor community, you have to prove that you actually live there (by entering an access code delivered by text), so it would be hard to research a neighborhood in which you do not live, but if you are librarian or information professional and need information on your own community, it could serve not only as a good barometer of local concerns but also as a guide to direct you to other sources.

ALGORITHMIC CONTENT

An additional trend, both in local reporting and in news in general, is the rise of algorithmically produced content. Essentially, computer programs analyze data, look for patterns, and produce narrative text that can serve as a real-time news story. According to research by the Tow Center for Journalism at Columbia University, “Automated journalism is most useful in generating routine news stories for repetitive topics for which clean, accurate, and structured data are available” (Andreas Graefe, “Guide to Automated Journalism,” Tow Center, Columbia University, Jan. 7, 2016; cjr.org/tow_center_reports/guide_to_automated_journalism.php). However, if data quality is poor or sparse, the resulting stories may have biases or errors. Therefore, computer-generated content is most helpful when news consumers need quick answers generated from reliable data sources. Human journalists will always continue to be needed when in-depth analysis and long-form narrative is required.

The Bloomberg News agency was one of the earliest adopt ers of AI-produced content. Many Bloomberg stories are essentially reports of company-released earnings and revenue forecasts that are plugged into the code in Bloomberg’s Cyborg program, resulting in an automated story. The Washington Post has used algorithms to report election results as they are tabulated, and The Los Angeles Times uses AI to turn U.S. Geological Survey earthquake data in to warning bulletins. What was once a spreadsheet or list of data is now formatted as a news story with basic text added along with the numbers (Nicole Martin, “Did a Robot Write This? How AI Is Impacting Journalism,” Forbes, Feb. 8, 2019; forbes.com/sites/nicolemartin1/2019/02/08/did-a-robot-write-this-how-ai-is-impacting-journalism/#a42377477957).

It is easy to understand why journalists might see this as a threat to their livelihoods, but as the Martin article goes on to describe, news executives have stated that their purpose is to give assistance to, not replace, journalists. If computer programs and templates can be used to write quarterly company earnings announcements and sports box scores, reporters will have more time to analyze company activity and strategy and produce in-depth profiles of athletes. One would hope, however, that fact-checking and research always remain central tenets of the work of content creators, whether they are machines or humans. “The work of journalism is creative, it’s about curiosity, it’s about storytelling, it’s about digging and holding governments accountable, it’s critical thinking, it’s judgment—and that is where we want our journalists spending their energy,” Lisa Gibbs, the director of news partnerships for the Associated Press, told Martin.

SEARCHING LOCAL

Local news faces many difficulties, financial and otherwise. This contributes to the frustration of reference librarians asked to “search regional papers.” You can’t search what isn’t there. The need for creativity, to look at alternative sources, such as social media and university newspapers, has never been great er. It’s not just all politics that are local, but that news about businesses, the economy, health statistics, crime, schools, and a host of other issues is local. If local newspapers go out of business, are replaced by imposter sites, or suffer from greatly diminished news coverage, librarians must be receptive to new sources and diligent in exposing false sources.