Twitter Wafflers and Operating Local Social Media

Our Town Reno's Substack has highlights of our weekly reporting and bonus content.

Jul 07, 2023

Many valuable local contributors, including journalists and entire outlets, have had an on and off relationship with Twitter, vacillating whether to leave entirely, occasionally coming back, while saying they’ve had it with the Elon Musk owned platform.

To us, that’s a pity, but we understand the erratic diktats and promulgations by tweet from the wealthiest person in the world are not to everyone’s liking.

As a hyperlocal information initiative at the intersection of journalism and social media, part of Our Town Reno’s DNA is to experiment with different platforms in terms of making our content seen, read and heard.

Reno Twitter was slow to develop, but during the Black Lives Matter movement and then the pandemic it came to life. For us, it’s an easy and information rich platform to share other articles, reports, photos and observations from and about Reno.

Comments on Twitter are often full of local insight. Here’s a recent one from “Curyote” after we tweeted an article about Reno ranked as the wildest city in America: “In the 70's there was nothing to do in this town if you were under 21 except for Roller King and the movies. So teenage drinking and keg parties were a huge thing. Course back then you could walk anywhere in this town in 20 minutes and that included Reno and Sparks.”

How wouldn’t we want that type of feedback?

So we will stick to Twitter while trying other platforms which seem to have some bite when they come around, such as the latest big kid on the block, Threads. Early traction there seems to be promising, but unlike Twitter, desktop use of it isn’t possible, our feed is inundated with content we never sought out, and so far it’s impossible to search keywords such as Reno.

To those reading our Substack and who might not know, we’re also active on TikTok, where we’ve gotten a few videos in the six figures, but generally our views are in the hundreds, Facebook, where traffic seems to come and go due to changing yet always mysterious algorithms, Instagram where we operate as BiggestLittleStreets and have the most followers and consistent traction, LinkedIn which works best when we feature a business or a member of the community already active there, and Reddit, where the ourtownreno subreddit is not performing as we thought it could.

Occasionally, we’ll have posts which go “viral” such as a video about the Truckee River which got 350K views recently on Facebook, or posts which prompt death threats such as those concerning Kyle Rittenhouse.

Navigating social media can be hairy business for an information outlet, but we believe it’s important to be active and responsive there, to try to reach younger, more diverse and less affluent communities while reporting about issues which matter to all of us.