Publisher Policy

Eligibility criteria for Publishers

Publishers must:

  1. Be in good standing with Nextdoor.
    • You are not actively violating any of Nextdoor’s Member Agreement, Business Services Terms, Community Guidelines, or any other written agreement you have with Nextdoor.
    • Your account has not received a violation in the past 90 days.
    • Your account has not been flagged for safety related reasons.
  2. Primarily focus on local news relevant to the selected discovery areas.
  3. Have a secure website.
  4. Use an email associated with their publisher domain or relevant representative business when signing up for a page.
  5. Have a history of publications dating back at least 1 year from page creation.
  6. Have publications within the last 30 days.
  7. Publicly acknowledge adherence to a Code of Ethics or Code of Conduct (e.g., SPJ Code of Ethics, IPSOS Code of Conduct)
  8. Be based in countries where Nextdoor’s publisher platform currently is made available.

Publishers must not:

  1. Be a political entity or affiliated with a political entity.
  2. Be a government agency, department, office, or representative.
  3. Primarily focus on religion or on national or international news.
  4. Be funded by a government foreign to the country of distribution.

You may be asked to provide the following information for verification purposes:

  1. Broadcasting license
  2. Press credentials
  3. Social media links
  4. Publisher or corporate email
  5. Or other forms of accreditation and publisher verification

Journalists must have an association with a news publisher that meets the conditions above.

Page quality requirements

Publishers may have a broader distribution range than neighbor accounts do. Because of this difference, content posted by our Publishers must adhere to the following policies to ensure a safe and informative experience for our neighbors.

Quality Standards

Nextdoor’s platform is meant to connect high quality local news content to our neighbors. In support of this mission, we hold a high bar when evaluating Publisher content and require the following quality standards:

Images accompanying articles may not include:

  1. Nudity: Explicit or sexually suggestive images.
  2. Gun Violence: Depictions of individuals with firearms in violent contexts.
  3. Drug Use: Visuals showing illegal drug use or paraphernalia.
  4. Graphic or Shocking Content: Visuals intended to shock or disturb viewers.
  5. Images unrelated to the content of your article.
  6. Poor quality images (see Content strategy & best practices for News Accounts for more examples).

Publisher page requirements

  1. Landing pages must direct audiences directly to your homepage associated with your publication.
  2. Descriptions must be clear, accurate, complete, contain proper punctuation and grammar, and relevant to your publication organization.

Content quality requirements

  1. Your publication’s title must be complete and properly formatted with correct punctuation and grammar.
  2. Descriptions must:
    1. Use a clearly visible high resolution photo.
    2. Use proper punctuation and grammar.
    3. Be complete and properly formatted.
    4. Links and URLs to your publications must be functional and directly route to the page where the article is published.

Content requirements

Content may not

  1. Violate Nextdoor’s Community Guidelines.
  2. Focus on national or international politics.
  3. Focus on religion.
  4. Be an obituary for a non-public persona. (Obituaries are allowed when the deceased individual was a public figure.)
  5. Promote, glorify, or encourage illegal drug use or sales, including cannabis regardless of its regional legal status. Factual news reporting on drug legislation or policy is permitted.
  6. Promote or encourage gambling activities.
  7. Contain excessive or explicit profanity.
  8. Depict, describe, or condone excessive or graphic harm to people or animals.
  9. Substantially differ from your headline or article image. We do not allow misleading practices such as false promises or bait and switch tactics.
  10. Direct or redirect to non-publisher third party platforms for the sake of boosting traffic, search engine optimization, or promoting affiliate marketing.
  11. Contain editorials or opinion pieces, including endorsements.
  12. Include sponsored articles (including but not limited to native advertising).
  13. Promote or sponsor any specific product, good, or service. Promotional activity using our Publisher platform is strictly prohibited.
  14. Misrepresent the source of any content, including misrepresenting sponsored content as independent news content.
  15. Violate any local laws in the content’s distribution area.
  16. Be fully or substantially created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) or generative technologies. (Content shared by Publishers must be the result of traditional journalistic effort and human authorship. Automated content generated purely for the sake of SEO, traffic boosting, or to masquerade as independent news is prohibited.)

Content must:

  1. Content must be locally relevant – We want all content to be valuable to our neighbors whenever they are on Nextdoor.
  2. Parody and satire must be clearly and properly labeled and disclosed – There’s a place on Nextdoor for humor, commentary, and entertainment. In the spirit of transparency and to avoid any potential confusion, we ask our publishers to ensure that viewers are aware when content is created in jest or for the purpose of entertainment and humor.
  3. All news content must have clearly visible or stated dates and bylines. All updates must be clearly labeled with time and date of when the most recent updates were made – Changes are important pieces of information that should be shared with the general public. It gives a sense of when updates are made and if and when content might have been altered. We ask that all news publishers provide the properly labeled times and dates on their content to provide additional information on recency and relevancy of news content. Artificially updating the date to fake relevancy is strictly prohibited.
  4. All content must originate from verified and credible sources with clear source attribution where appropriate – Journalistic integrity is a core value of trustworthy news reporting. As such, we require that all news content be created from reliable sources and give credit when it is appropriate to do so. Neighbors should know the general sources of information that our news publishers utilize in creating their news content.
  5. Content should be unbiased, informative, and objective – We do not allow opinion pieces or editorials. Any news content that contains sections with opinions or perspectives should clearly disclose and attribute those opinions or perspectives (for example, to a person interviewed).
  6. Content must be the product of human journalistic effort and authorship, strictly excluding fully or substantially AI-generated content.

Enforcement

These policies are put in place to ensure the safety and experience of our neighbors when engaging with local news on our platform. Failure to adhere to these guidelines may result in content removal, account suspension, page removal, page de-verification, limiting distribution, or other enforcement actions.

We will continue to monitor and reiterate these policies to best reflect the needs of our platform. If you think you see a post that violates our Publisher Policy, please use Nextdoor’s reporting feature.