OCTOBER 11TH, 2017
Announcing CrowdTangle for Local News

At CrowdTangle, we believe that local news is an incredibly important part of the news ecosystem and it's one that our team, as well as the Facebook Journalism Project more broadly, is passionate about supporting. In fact, we work with with over 1,300 local newsrooms across the world and we are adding more local partners every day.

We also know that publishers, especially local newsrooms, are overwhelmed with the amount of data they have access to these days. As a result, we've been working with our partners to build solutions that make it easier for their newsrooms to get the data and insights they need.

That's why we're excited to announce CrowdTangle for Local News.

We've built a version of CrowdTangle specifically designed for local newsrooms. We've taken some of the most frequent requests we've received from our local partners and put them into a dedicated version of our platform. Local newsrooms represent some of our most active users, and we hope that this is only going to make it easier to use CrowdTangle to inform their work.

CrowdTangle for Local News will include all the functionality of the existing CrowdTangle platform plus:
  • The ability to follow conversations in public Facebook Groups
  • Twenty thousand new accounts that you can find in our public lists, including first responders and universities broken down by every state in the U.S.
  • A new feature that allows you to create teams within your organization, designed to more closely mirror how newsrooms are structured
  • A dedicated resources section for local newsrooms
  • A new searchable help section
  • And, coming soon, the ability to follow posts from verified profiles

What our partners are saying:
  • “The new CrowdTangle Groups feature is absolutely essential to stay connected to the most meaningful Facebook communities in our region. We use the feature to listen to local voices and are able to create more relevant stories because of it. This feature adds to our social listening and helps us to enable, inform and engage the people in North Rhine-Westphalia,” said Daniel Fiene, digital strategy, RP Online.

  • “The thing I really like about local lists is that it lets us focus on what some of the more active and important organizations are posting,” said Louie Villalobos, Social Media Manager, AZ Central. "The state-wide agency list we created, for example, makes it super easy to see what they are posting and how people are responding. If we get to it early enough we’re able to see posts before our competition and before they really catch fire. We got the idea from an early-morning attempt to see what was going on in one of the northern counties and figured out it would helpful if there was a way to filter directly to state agencies. It was easy to set up and it’s easy to adjust.”

  • “We use CrowdTangle in many ways, but perhaps the most transformative role that CrowdTangle has played in our company is its use by our local and national real-time teams,” said Jessica Huff, Social Media Director, McClatchy. “Our real-time teams use CrowdTangle’s local lists feature to monitor content from our competitors, local organizations, and people in the community, and we’re thrilled to have access to more with this update. When the team spots stories of intense interest or value to our communities, they aggregate those stories and quickly do additional reporting to transform those good ideas into something unique. The reporters on our real-time teams are often the number one traffic drivers in our company, and for good reason. They're our first-responders, and the folks who are keeping up with the social media conversations happening in our markets.”

We're starting to roll out CrowdTangle for Local News this week and will continue to add more and more features to the platform. We know we have even more work to do, but we're excited about taking this next step.

Finally, we wanted to say a big thank you to all our local partners. You've played a huge role in helping shape this launch and we're excited about continuing to build products that make it easier for you to do your jobs.