4 ms·

We had a water problem and I didnt know about it until days later. No local TV and not reading the paper + no facebook= living somewhere else? I knew all abou

We had a water problem and I didnt know about it until days later. No local TV and not reading the paper + no facebook= living somewhere else? I knew all about HN, but no clue that we couldnt use water.

tombrossman 8y ago
This is where Twitter excels. It's the best way I have found to get local breaking news. Don't bother following any media outlets either, it's counterintuitive but their feeds are mostly marketing garbage with extra click tracking/redirects and excessive dupes. Pick a few local journos whose articles or reporting you like and follow them instead. Those, plus random friends and other local people will give you all the news you need almost instantly. I don't even turn the TV on when something big happens any more, I just check Twitter.
- ghaff 8y ago
  That assumes you live somewhere that has local journos to speak of. I only live about 40 miles outside of a major US city. But there's no real local news source. I'd only find out about an emergency because of a auto-call from the local emergency services or because it was such big news that it was covered in the Boston Globe.
kbenson 8y ago
This is where another HN front page item (neighbourly.google.com)[1] might help soon, nextdoor.com might help right now, and facebook with some local contacts probably would have sufficed. I can't stand Facebook, but it was better than nothing during the Northern California wildfires this last year, so I logged in and used it. The groups created by residents to track info were wonderful at first, but quickly descended into somewhat low utility after a day or tow as people regurgitated old information and misinformation every few hours, each time one level removed from the source and thus a bit harder for people to confirm or deny. My wide uses nextdoor.com, and I've long thought I should take a look, but never gotten around to it. It would be interesting to see if Google can leverage their brand name to get enough people to sign up such that you could easily switch between multiple levels of locality, and also allow local news to leverage that in a way that preserves local reporting. If I could easily toggle between neighborhood, school district, city, state and region to find relevant information, and discussions, I would be pleasantly surprised. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209127

tombrossman 8y ago

This is where Twitter excels. It's the best way I have found to get local breaking news. Don't bother following any media outlets either, it's counterintuitive but their feeds are mostly marketing garbage with extra click tracking/redirects and excessive dupes. Pick a few local journos whose articles or reporting you like and follow them instead. Those, plus random friends and other local people will give you all the news you need almost instantly. I don't even turn the TV on when something big happens any more, I just check Twitter.

ghaff 8y ago
That assumes you live somewhere that has local journos to speak of. I only live about 40 miles outside of a major US city. But there's no real local news source. I'd only find out about an emergency because of a auto-call from the local emergency services or because it was such big news that it was covered in the Boston Globe.

kbenson 8y ago

This is where another HN front page item (neighbourly.google.com)[1] might help soon, nextdoor.com might help right now, and facebook with some local contacts probably would have sufficed. I can't stand Facebook, but it was better than nothing during the Northern California wildfires this last year, so I logged in and used it. The groups created by residents to track info were wonderful at first, but quickly descended into somewhat low utility after a day or tow as people regurgitated old information and misinformation every few hours, each time one level removed from the source and thus a bit harder for people to confirm or deny. My wide uses nextdoor.com, and I've long thought I should take a look, but never gotten around to it. It would be interesting to see if Google can leverage their brand name to get enough people to sign up such that you could easily switch between multiple levels of locality, and also allow local news to leverage that in a way that preserves local reporting. If I could easily toggle between neighborhood, school district, city, state and region to find relevant information, and discussions, I would be pleasantly surprised. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209127 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17209127