Connecting communities through local journalism
Local news is in trouble. Hundreds of local newspapers have closed since 2005, and the ones still operating are fighting for digital attention against national outlets with vastly larger budgets and broader reach. Read This Online was built specifically to fix that distribution problem — not by replacing local journalism, but by making sure the stories that get written actually reach the people they’re written for.
What Read This Online does
Read This Online is a local news distribution platform that uses AI-powered audience matching to connect community journalism with local readers. Reporters and newsrooms publish their stories to the platform. The technology then analyzes reader interests, location data, and engagement history to route each story to the audience most likely to care about it.
The core problem Read This Online solves is simple but stubborn: a story about a zoning dispute in one neighborhood shouldn’t have to compete with national political coverage to reach the 200 homeowners directly affected by it. Those 200 people want that story. They just need a way to find it — or have it find them.
How the technology works
At the center of Read This Online is an AI system designed specifically for local news distribution. It does four things that matter:
- Community-level pattern analysis. Rather than treating all readers as a single mass audience, the platform maps interests by neighborhood, zip code, and region. A resident in Austin’s East Side gets different story recommendations than someone in the suburbs 15 miles west — because the news that affects them is different.
- Source credibility verification. Stories run through checks against local and national databases to authenticate sources and flag factual inconsistencies. This isn’t a substitute for editorial judgment, but it’s a meaningful filter that helps maintain the trust local journalism depends on.
- Engagement tracking. When readers click, share, or spend time with a story, the system learns. That feedback loop helps reporters understand which topics their communities actually respond to — and helps readers get fewer stories they scroll past without reading.
- Delivery timing optimization. The platform identifies when specific audience segments are most active and schedules distribution accordingly. A story about a school board budget vote probably lands better on a Tuesday evening than a Saturday morning.
Who uses Read This Online
The platform serves three distinct groups, and each group has a different value.
Local reporters and independent journalists
Reporters get access to an audience they couldn’t easily build on their own. A freelance journalist covering municipal government in a mid-size city has great stories but limited distribution infrastructure. Read This Online gives that reporter a channel that routes their work directly to residents who follow city hall news — without requiring them to build a social media following from scratch.
The analytics dashboard is useful here, too. Reporters can see:
- Which stories performed well and which fell flat
- Which topics drove the most reader engagement
- Where their audience is geographically concentrated
- How their reach changes over time
That kind of data, which large national outlets take for granted, has historically been out of reach for community journalists working with minimal resources.
Community members
Most news aggregators serve a general interest audience, which means local stories get buried under national coverage. Read This Online’s model inverts that. The platform is built around local content first, so a resident looking for news about their city, school district, or neighborhood isn’t wading through stories about events 1,000 miles away.
Local news organizations
Independent digital newsrooms, legacy newspapers, and community radio stations get a distribution network that extends their reach without requiring them to rebuild their technology stack. The platform integrates with existing publishing workflows, so editorial staff can keep using the tools they already know.
The local news problem Read This Online addresses
To understand why a platform like this matters, look at what’s happened to local journalism over the past two decades:
- The Pew Research Center documented a 57%+ decline in U.S. newspaper newsroom jobs between 2008 and 2020
- The Local News Initiative at Northwestern University identified more than 200 counties with no local news outlet at all — some of them suburban counties with hundreds of thousands of residents
- Research in the Journal of Financial Economics found that municipal borrowing costs increase in counties that lose their local newspaper, because there’s less scrutiny of local government finances
- Voter turnout in local elections drops when local news disappears
- Corruption goes undetected longer without reporters covering city council meetings
Read This Online isn’t trying to fund newsrooms or pay reporters. That’s a different problem with different solutions. What the platform addresses is a distribution failure: even in communities that do have local reporters, those reporters often lack the tools to reach their full potential audience. A story that took two weeks to investigate shouldn’t disappear after 48 hours because the publication doesn’t have the infrastructure to keep surfacing it to the right readers.
What makes Read This Online different from other news aggregators
News aggregators have been around since the early days of the web, and most share the same core flaw: they optimize for engagement at scale, which means they surface whatever generates the most clicks across the broadest possible audience. Local stories rarely win that competition.
Read This Online’s model is different in two key ways:
- Different optimization target. The platform doesn’t measure success by raw traffic volume. It measures success by relevance. A story about a proposed development project near a specific school has a natural audience of maybe 3,000 people. If 2,400 of them see it, that’s a success.
- Built-in verification. Most aggregators republish content from their source feeds without additional review. Read This Online checks source credibility and runs content through fact-checking before distribution — a layer of review that protects both readers and reporters.
The network Read This Online has built
Read This Online currently serves communities across the United States. The network includes:
- Independent local newspapers and digital newsrooms
- Community radio and television stations
- Neighborhood-level bloggers and citizen journalists
- Municipal governments and civic organizations
- Local schools, libraries, and community centers
- Regional business associations and chambers of commerce
That last category might seem unusual, but it reflects a real aspect of how local information flows. A chamber of commerce covering a new business opening or a regulatory change is doing something functionally similar to journalism: gathering information relevant to a specific community and distributing it to the people who need it.
Quality standards on the platform
Every story on Read This Online goes through a verification process before distribution. That process covers:
- Source authentication
- Fact-checking against local and national databases
- Content quality review against journalistic standards
- Plagiarism detection
- Community relevance verification
These aren’t optional steps. The platform’s value depends on reader trust, and reader trust depends on the content being accurate and relevant. A single false story can damage a platform’s credibility with local audiences far more than a dozen accurate stories can repair it.
Getting started with Read This Online
For reporters and newsrooms: Join the network directly through the Read This Online website. The onboarding process fits around existing workflows — publications don’t need to change their content management systems or restructure their publishing process to use the platform.
For community members: Read This Online is free to use. Create an account, enter your location and areas of interest, and the platform starts surfacing relevant local stories. The more you engage with content, the more precisely the system learns what to send your way.
Local news has a distribution problem that’s been building for years. Read This Online is one concrete attempt to solve it — by building the infrastructure that helps community journalism reach the readers who need it, in the communities where it matters most.
To connect your newsroom to the platform, contact the Read This Online team through the website.