Chicago's social network is a huge bet for news. I think it's the future.

Link: Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try, by Sophie Culpepper in Nieman Lab

I’ve been more excited about this announcement than any other development in either social media or news technology this year. Chicago Public Media — which runs both WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times — will run a network of online social communities for Chicago neighborhoods at chicago.com. These communities run on New_ Public’s Roundabout, a social networking platform designed to be a positive space for local communities to organize, meet, and share.

As Nieman Lab reports:

“Roundabout’s team sees these communities as places local reporters can be invited into to listen and build trust — places where they can answer people’s questions and learn what they should be reporting on. Reporters, and reporting, are not central to what Roundabout is; they are components that can strengthen the local community conversation that is central.”

I strongly believe that this sort of community engagement is how news turns around its precipitous decline in trust from the public. People trust human relationships, not brands; hosting a space to support those relationships, and forming them authentically and organically with a wider community, will lead to more representative journalism, stronger trust from the public, and better information overall. More than that, these sorts of communities have the potential to meet what most people need from local journalism in a format that feels more equitable (everyone participates rather than it being a voice from above) and modern.

Roundabout is not the only game in town here: this is a genuine, growing trend across media. The Newsmast Foundation has been building community spaces for newsrooms that are backed by the Fediverse; its first major launch was British newspaper the Bristol Cable last year. Meanwhile, Bonfire Networks has been building its community platform to operate with similar intentions to Roundabout, including by working with media companies like Jacobin Germany.

Still, this is a significant, brave development, particularly for US media, and is notable for its scope and ambition. It’s incredibly rare for a news organization to put their neck on the line and truly build new technology that up-ends existing paradigms. A new kind of social space for one of America’s largest cities fits that bill. Conversely, working with local media orgs — people who already understand their local communities deeply and are active in them — is a great way for New_ Public to build a platform that is safer and less toxic than something like Nextdoor. Roundabout has a bunch of its own features that help provide this safety; the focus on conversation over profiles or clout, and Nextdoor’s notoriously racist “suspicious person” posts are banned.

There’s something else here too: Blaine Cook, currently the platform’s principal engineer, confirmed that it runs on AT Protocol, the open social web protocol that powers Bluesky. It’s its own archipelago for now, but once private spaces land in AT Protocol properly, it’ll be connected to the wider network (known as the Atmosphere). This protocol compatibility allows anyone to build their own apps. Once Chicago’s network is connected to the wider Atmosphere, anyone will be able to build other communities that connect up to it, and build platform software that interoperates with Chicago’s. Given the size of this project, it’s likely the biggest foray for any media company onto the open social web.

If this experiment in Chicago is successful, I think we’ll see New_ Public expand to work with other media orgs — and we’ll see some of the orgs that might not have considered this kind of platform come around to the idea.