Why social media no longer works for local news

There was a time when following your council and a couple of neighbourhood accounts was enough to stay reasonably up to date. Rely on that today and you will miss almost everything, and not because they stopped posting.

What changed

The confusion comes from an assumption that no longer holds: believing that following an account means seeing what it posts. That has not been true for a long time. What you see is decided by an algorithm optimising time spent, not usefulness.

And a water cut notice does not compete with a video. It never will.

The three decisions that broke it

1. External links were penalised

Platforms profit when you stay inside. A link takes you away, so content with links gets less reach than content that stays in the app. The result: local outlets, which depend on clicks, are the worst affected.

2. Short video was prioritised

Every platform reoriented its recommendations towards vertical video, which retains far better. Municipal information — a text, a PDF, a poster — is precisely the opposite.

3. Feeds moved from "what you follow" to "what we recommend"

The underlying shift. Your feed used to be your following list; now it is a selection based on what engages, where accounts you follow are a small part. You can follow your council and not see a single post from them in a month.

The consequence for local news

The combined effect is quite concrete:

• Council notices do not arrive. The council posts, believes it has communicated, and the actual reach is a small percentage of its followers.
• Local outlets lose what they had left. After two decades of cuts, the hit to social traffic was the final blow.
• Rumour wins. What does circulate well is what triggers reactions, favouring the alarming message over the boring but accurate notice. That is why false claims travel better than corrections.
• Everything retreats to messaging. Group chats have absorbed much of neighbourhood information, with no filter and no way to correct anything.

What works now

The underlying idea is simple: go back to channels where you decide what you receive, not an algorithm.

1. Your council's email newsletter. Unglamorous and highly effective: if you subscribe, it arrives. No intermediary.
2. RSS feeds. They survived precisely because nobody decides for you what reaches you. How they work.
3. Geolocated aggregators, which gather your area's sources and sort them by proximity rather than by what engages.
4. The council website, bookmarked. Old-fashioned, but it is the source and it is always there.
5. Broadcast channels, when the sender uses them well: no algorithm in between.

Social media still works for discovering things and for conversation. What it is no longer is a reliable channel for finding out what is happening on your street. If you depend on it for that, it is not that you are badly informed: it is that you believe you are informed, which is worse.

This guide covers how to set it up in ten minutes.

Where Snurkel fits

Of the alternatives above, the first three share one drawback: you have to set them up one by one and maintain them. Subscribing to your council newsletter, finding its RSS feed and adding your area outlets is half an afternoon of work, and afterwards the information is still scattered.

Snurkel does that assembly for you. It collects what more than 10,700 sources publish across councils and outlets, and instead of ordering it by what engages, it orders it by proximity to the area you draw on the map.

It is, essentially, what social media promised early on and stopped doing: showing you what happens around you because it affects you, not because it triggers reactions.