Nextdoor’s App Redesign Blends News and Neighborhood Updates

Nextdoor, the neighborhood-focused social network, has rolled out a sweeping app redesign that reimagines the platform as a daily local hub. The 14-year-old company is moving beyond its message-board roots of lost pet notices and yard sale posts. In their place, Nextdoor is introducing curated local and national news content, real-time safety alerts, and AI-powered recommendations all aimed at making the app an indispensable daily utility for community information. “This is a new Nextdoor,” says co-founder and CEO Nirav Tolia, noting the platform has “never had publisher content before. We’ve never had an alert service. We’ve never had integration with an AI agent” until now. The overhaul positions Nextdoor to combine verified journalism with the chatter of community updates, in hopes that neighbors will rely on it every day instead of only checking in occasionally.

Bringing Verified News to the Neighborhood Feed

One of the most striking changes is the prominence of local news in Nextdoor’s feed. For the first time, users will see a “Today’s local news” carousel of headlines from professional outlets at the top of the app. Nextdoor has signed partnerships with over 3,500 local and national news publishers across the U.S., U.K. and Canada – ranging from community papers to larger outlets like Axios and the Toronto Star – to pipe their stories into neighborhood feeds, Nextdoor told TechCrunch. These are not full articles hosted inside Nextdoor, but headlines, snippets and photos that link out to the publishers’ sites. Users can click through for the full story, and even discuss the news in comment threads beneath each item.

Nextdoor’s goal is to supplement its neighbor-generated posts with vetted journalism and in-depth reporting. “Historically, Nextdoor has relied 100% on user-generated content… that’s been great, but to really make sure if it’s happening in your neighborhood, we need to bring in local news as well,” Tolia explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “This is the first time we’re letting third-party publishers use our distribution.” The company conducted research and heard from members that they want to know what’s going on around them and feel safer and smarter about their community, needs the team realized pure neighbor chatter wasn’t fully meeting. By infusing professionally reported updates on city hall decisions, school events, crime reports, and more, Nextdoor hopes to provide a one-stop source of trustworthy local information that neighbors might otherwise miss.

Crucially, Nextdoor is positioning this as a collaborative lifeline for local media rather than a replacement. The platform isn’t paying publishers for their content, nor are publishers paying Nextdoor. It’s a free partnership to boost reach. Several publishers in the beta launch have already seen a bump in referral traffic, though as one news industry expert noted, relying on third-party platforms can be unpredictable over the long term. Nextdoor, for its part, believes helping revive community news is integral to its mission and to keeping users engaged with higher-quality content.

Real-Time Alerts to Power a Daily Utility

Another pillar of the redesign is a new Alerts feature for real-time safety updates. Nextdoor has added a dedicated alerts tab and interactive map that shows local emergencies and service interruptions things like severe weather, fires, power outages, road closures and police activity. These alerts feed from official sources (not just neighbor posts) in partnership with agencies such as weather services, utility companies, and public safety departments. The app even color-codes alerts by severity and can target notifications hyper-locally to affected streets or neighborhoods.

AI-Powered Recommendations from 15 Years of Chatter

The third major component, dubbed “Faves,” brings artificial intelligence into the mix to harness Nextdoor’s trove of local knowledge. Faves is an AI chatbot and search tool that lets users quickly get recommendations and answers about their area, drawn from over a decade of neighbor discussions on the platform. Instead of posting a question and waiting hours for replies (the old Nextdoor way), you can now ask the Faves assistant something like “Where’s a great place for a family hike this weekend?” or “Know a reliable electrician in our neighborhood?” The AI will instantly generate a brief summary of the top suggestions that neighbors have given over the years, and show links to the specific past posts or comments behind those recommendations.

Tolia is quick to note this is proprietary data not indexed on Google or available to ChatGPT, giving Nextdoor a unique edge. “If you wanted to know all the lemonade stands that kids are operating in your neighborhood, you can’t go to Google Maps or ask ChatGPT,” he told TechCrunch, illustrating how granular the local knowledge on Nextdoor can be.

By speeding up the feedback loop for these everyday questions, the team hopes Nextdoor becomes more immediately useful. It also underscores a philosophy shift: Nextdoor is no longer just a social network where people chat, but a local discovery platform where AI and community content together deliver answers on demand.

Nextdoor’s Bid to Be a Daily Habit

All these changes ladder up to Nextdoor’s broader strategy: to transform from an occasional-use app into a daily habit. The company says it has over 100 million registered users, but many would only check in infrequently perhaps when a specific issue arose.

The redesign is Nextdoor’s answer to this challenge – a bid to make itself “the first screen” people open every morning for a concise wrap of what’s happening nearby. By providing news, alerts, and useful tips in one place, Nextdoor is channeling the utility of a local newspaper, the urgency of an emergency radio, and the convenience of a neighborhood bulletin board all at once. The company even refreshed its branding and hired a former New York Times design lead, Georg Petschnigg, to craft a more modern, information-centric look. It’s also a high-stakes gambit. Nextdoor went public via SPAC in 2021, but its stock has plummeted over 80% since then amid sluggish growth and ongoing losses.

Opportunities and Challenges Ahead

Nextdoor’s newsy new direction has drawn both optimism and skepticism from media observers. On one hand, it arrives at a moment when local journalism needs all the help it can get. The U.S. has lost a quarter of its newspapers since 2005, and many surviving community outlets struggle to reach readers on digital platforms dominated by viral entertainment. Nextdoor offering a built-in audience of nearby residents – for free – could be a lifeline.

For news consumers and neighbors, the revamped Nextdoor promises a richer information diet but also raises some questions. Will users embrace Nextdoor as their go-to daily news source? The app’s reputation in past years was mixed: many joined to complain about porch pirates or read petty squabbles, and some were turned off by negativity or reports of racial profiling on the platform. Nextdoor has made efforts to improve moderation (even instituting stricter guidelines to curb discriminatory “suspicious person” posts), but the infusion of hot-button news topics could test those systems.

Whether this ambitious reboot will truly make Nextdoor a daily habit and a viable business remains to be seen. The company is essentially attempting to do what local newspapers, community bulletin boards, and Facebook groups each do, all under one roof. It’s a tall order, but Nextdoor’s leadership is energized.

For now, it has put the pieces in place: verified journalism, real-time alerts, and neighborly knowledge, all in one app. The coming months will reveal if this combination can indeed make Nextdoor “the app you can’t live without” in the life of a neighborhood, or if transforming local chatter into a daily news habit is a challenge even the friendliest of social networks cannot easily crack.