Local News Chatter: Augmenting Community News by Aggregating Hyperlocal Microblog Content in a Tag Cloud

Being aware of local community information is critical to maintaining civic engagement and participation. The use of online news and microblog content to create and disseminate community information has long been studied. However, interactions in the online spaces dedicated to local communities tend to only garner very limited usage, and people often do not consider microblog content as a meaningful source of local community information. Local News Chatter (LNC) was designed to address these challenges by augmenting local news feeds with microblog content and presenting them in a tag cloud that displays news topics of varying popularity with different tag sizes. Our study with 30 local residents highlights that LNC increases the visibility of hyperlocal community news information and successfully utilizes microblog as an additional information layer. LNC also increases one’s community awareness and shows the potential for leveraging community knowledge as a deliberation platform for local topics.

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