Local news is in a crisis. Twitter has a plan to boost it, but there are risks.
Twitter is, apparently, trying to do its part to resuscitate local news, a vital institution that seems like it's on its last breath.
The social media giant is set to launch an advertising and marketing campaign aimed, in part, at boosting local journalists and their work, according to a report from Axios. Twitter has since confirmed the campaign in an email to Mashable.
The company will run full-page ads in 28 local newspapers across the Gannett/USA Today and McClatchy network that will direct readers to Twitter Lists of local journalist to follow. The lists will be curated by the local papers. Twitter also plans to push the hashtag #FollowLocalJournalists and organize conversations about local news on its Clubhouse clone platform, called Spaces.
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"Local journalists [are] so incredibly important to the conversation on Twitter," Niketa Patel, head of print and digital news partnerships at Twitter, told Axios. "We're viewing this as a way of ensuring that Twitter is giving local journalists a national spotlight."
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It's tough to see much of anything Twitter could do to really help local news outlets. News of any kind has struggled since three tech giants — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — now collect more than half of all ad spending in the U.S.
Local news, meanwhile, has been hemorrhaging jobs since the Great Recession. The pandemic has made things worse. Gannett alone had three rounds of layoffs and further dished out some 500 buyouts.
Local news, despite precious few jobs and often low pay, does vital work. For instance, WITF, a local news-radio station in Harrisburg, Penn. with just eight employees, was cited by the Washington Post for its work to hold legislators accountable after some voted to overturn results from the legally conducted and historically fair 2020 election.
And amid major corporations and venture capitalists bleeding local news dry, other business models have cropped up. A personal favorite, Block Club Chicago, created a successful non-profit, reader-funded, neighborhood-focused outlet after local news site DNAinfo was shuttered by a billionaire owner.
So there is some hope that the dearth of local news might one day get replaced by a sustainable alternative, and a visibility-boosting campaign from the likes of Twitter could help raise awareness on that front. Although, as Nieman Lab reported, some grifters have taken advantage of the lack of local news. They've filled that vacuum with hyper-partisan, inaccurate posts that masquerade as real local news. (Mashable has asked Twitter to comment on the Nieman Lab report and the risks of its campaign signal-boosting bad actors.)
If the Twitter effort leads a few people toward real news instead of the fake stuff, then it would be a wonderful success.
Topics X/Twitter
Tim Marcin is an Associate Editor on the culture team at Mashable, where he mostly digs into the weird parts of the internet. You'll also see some coverage of memes, tech, sports, trends, and the occasional hot take. You can find him on Bluesky (sometimes), Instagram (infrequently), or eating Buffalo wings (as often as possible).
