🗞️📱 Blurring boundaries between local news and social media
Learning from The 016, Worcester’s digital journalism experiment
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Local digital spaces, including town Facebook groups, Nextdoor neighborhoods, and community email lists, occupy a kind of gray area. They’re not exactly what we picture when we think of “social media,” and they do a lot of jobs that used to belong to other kinds of orgs and institutions, like local newspapers. And yet, when it comes to socializing with neighbors, and finding out essential local information — like how nearby roads might be changed — there’s often no better place on the internet.
That’s why we were so excited to check out The 016, a significant local news aggregator in Worcester, MA, with built-in social features. Is it a news site? A social media site? Something else? Below, reporter Ashira Morris delivers a fascinating case study of The 016, helping us further our growing taxonomy of local digital spaces.
–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public
Case Study: The 016
Opening up The 016 feels like entering a social media site from the pre-vertical video era. The site publishes its own reporting about the Worcester, MA metro area alongside links to news stories from local outlets. The homepage is all text links with classic blue URLs, updated each day.
Topical pages with Facebook-style posts link out to other news publications. It is blessedly all chronological. There might be the option to like, comment, and share, but you can scroll through pages of posts without seeing any thumbs ups or comment threads. It looks like a social media site, but it’s all Worcester news in the feed.
Worcester (pronounced wuss-ter) is the second largest city in New England, with about two hundred thousand residents, and 016 are the numbers at the beginning of the zip code. Since The 016 launched five years ago, the site has amassed an audience of more than 20,000 people who log on for bundled, verified news. It’s the largest daily audience in Worcester, according to founder Mark Henderson.
So how did we get here — with Worcester’s go-to local news aggregator styled like Facebook circa 2014? Social media has fundamentally changed local news, in no small part by promising an audience if media outlets play by their constantly changing rules. Reaching people without advertising is basically impossible now: average monthly organic reach on Facebook dropped below 1 percent in December. If you want your posts seen on big social media platforms, you need to pay.
As local media organizations figure out how to reach their audiences, and people increasingly seek refuge in smaller digital groups, The 016 offers another model.
“We set out to create a home for all types of news,” Henderson said, “leaning into journalism to make sure it gets the audience it deserves.”
To build that home, Henderson wanted to indicate that The 016 was a sharing platform, not a conventional news site. It was built using the specific visual language of social media, with specific expectations of how we interact with what we’re looking at online. For me, the format was immediately nostalgic and comforting in its simplicity. It felt like the optimistic promise of an earlier internet: to build an ecosystem to actually connect people, and not just to cash in on their attention.
Especially in tandem with the decline of local newspapers, there have been other experiments in combining local journalism and social media, like Patch, once a local media offshoot of AOL, and the newer AI-generated, localized newsletter, Good Daily. There have been plenty of Big Tech attempts to connect people who live near each other, including Nextdoor and Facebook Groups — which are all that’s left in some places.
It’s worth asking: What does it mean to be part of the local media ecosystem, anyway? Patch at least hired reporters (although few were full time employees) while Good Daily is scraping content from local sites with LLMs (and one human) as its editorial team. The 016, in contrast, is not part of a national, localized chain, but it has its own hybridized approach to compiling and disseminating news in the Worcester community, supporting both individual reporters and whole publications.
Henderson spent much of his career as a newspaper reporter for Worcester’s daily, the Telegram & Gazette, whose staff has shrunk by 75% since it was sold to Gannett in 2014. Last year Henderson told the What Works podcast that when he was building The 016 back in 2018, he bet on three things: that he could convene a fractured media market, that more people wanted to contribute to the civic dialogue than just traditional media reporters, and that over time, Facebook would de-emphasize news.
Those bets have paid off. Henderson started conversations with legacy media outlets in Worcester, who were eager for his idea. In the five years that The 016 has been up and running, the number of local media companies increased from 7 to 18. The 016 has been a convener of those new outlets. That includes Bill Shaner, the founding writer of the Worcester Sucks and I Love It newsletter, which reads like a punk show organizer covering City Hall.
“The current state of news in a city like Worcester, with its paper of record being continually stripped for parts by a hedge fund, means a lot of small and emerging outlets staffed by one or two people,” Shaner told me over email. “There are more outlets than ever and less local journalists than ever.”
The 016 brings it all into one place. Instead of checking a long list of local and statewide websites, Shaner looks at the site’s daily summary email as part of his morning news roundup routine.
“It’s an aggregator with a human touch and human news judgement,” he said. “As algorithms on the big apps become worse and worse, it’s easier to miss stuff.”
The platform has also helped successfully launch and network some reporters: when local mom Aislinn Doyle noticed lacking coverage of the local School Committee, she started reporting on it for her own Substack and The 016 shared many of her posts. In her first six months writing the newsletter, The 016 readers accounted for about a quarter of her subscribers and a third of all views. Her newsletter has now merged into a recurring feature on the Worcester Sucks newsletter.
In addition to the growing number of media outlets, Henderson encourages local businesses and government entities to post on The 016. Scrolling through the Worcester News vertical at the end of January, users would have come across the city’s parking ban announcement ahead of a snow storm and a note from a community media organizer about an upcoming virtual town hall with Worcester’s state senator.
Henderson also bet that people wouldn’t want to log onto The 016 and get riled up, like the way they do from Facebook’s algorithm prioritizing engaging — often angry — posts. It’s possible to access the website without an account. If you do sign up, you automatically get 29 “friends” when you join — but those “friends” are just news categories that automatically populate your feed, like “Colleges in 016” or “Business” or “Today’s Weather.” You can add or remove those news category “friends” to tailor your feed as you like, but any outlet or individual posting on the site has been personally verified by Henderson.
“We've found that by guarding the front door, the house is pretty safe,” he said.
Henderson noticed that there were “more people wanting just a news experience” as opposed to what they were getting on social media.
When he surveyed users a few years ago about why they use The 016, the replies varied widely: people checked the site for restaurant reviews, for reliable COVID news, for obituaries. Some specifically said it was challenging to keep up with the news from all the city’s different outlets. For Henderson, that was a sign that the site was working.
“We saw that yes, we’re not going back to the printed newspaper,” he said. “But the printed newspaper as a bundle of news had massive appeal because people would look at it for the reasons they chose.”
Henderson emphasizes total audience and page views as guiding metrics, not engagement. Some original posts, like this one about a proposed street roundabout redesign, take off on other social platforms, where tempers flare, but the comments remain polite within The 016. Not trying to drive engagement is another way the site is able to keep things closer to “facts, not spin" and keep moderation costs low, Henderson said. For now, he’s the sole site moderator. Financially, the site is supported by a combination of website and email sponsors as well as sponsored posts.
The challenge now is growing the audience to fulfill its mission of reaching the city like newspapers did in their heyday. Right now, that means reaching out on other social networks like Nextdoor and Facebook, as well as showing up at local events in person. The vision is to continue reaching new audiences by amplifying existing work — like the Wachusett Echo, the high school paper for Wachusett Regional High School. Part of the “evangelizing” work is to tell people it’s okay to post. And for the people who do post, The 016 has an audience waiting.
“Now that everybody is a media company, people understand that journalists have a superpower,” Henderson said. “The two toughest things in media these days are: 1) convene an audience for your product 2) do it again tomorrow.”
– Ashira Morris
Thanks Ashira! As a reminder, you can see all of New_ Public’s open roles here.
Taking the new e-bike out for a spin in the spring weather this weekend,
–Josh
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