After ceding their communities to social media for years, some newsrooms are rebuilding forums from scratch and discovering that building one is the easy part.
Recently, newsrooms have been returning to an old question: should we be in the forum business again? In June, WIRED announced a forum-style app that will launch as a perk for its 500,000-plus subscribers. Defector.com has a paywalled, lively comment section similar to a community forum. Johnny Harris’ NewPress built a shared community space for audiences who want to get their information by connecting with creator journalists, including a “Members’ Table.” In Vermont, the family-run Front Porch Forum has grown local forums town-by-town for the past 20 years with a current staff of about 30. And South Africa’s Daily Maverick built “Connect” directly on their own site – topic-based hubs where readers interact with each other and with Maverick’s journalists – describing it as “all the cool Facebook groups were in one place”.
None of these initiatives are purely a reactive comment section. These forums work as digital community spaces with an identity, a memory, and content that’s compelling and useful enough to keep people coming back on their own.
This trend emerges from the continuing shift in how people consume news. For the first time, according to the Reuters Institute's 2026 Digital News Report, more people get their news from social media and video platforms (54%) than from news organizations' own sites and apps (51%). Meanwhile, people are increasingly turning to online communities for local information. In late 2025, Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans (52%) get local news at least sometimes from online forums or discussion groups — up from 38% in 2018 — including spaces such as Reddit, Facebook, Nextdoor, or WhatsApp chats. These platforms aggregate conversations but rarely curate or verify them.
Additionally, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that only 25% of Americans said they trust the news most of the time. All together, these findings point to a challenge for newsrooms: audiences are already engaging and lurking online, just not within platforms news organizations own or control. So, how can newsrooms reach audiences not only where they are, but where they trust?
Why should newsrooms build forums?
For Arielle Goldstein, WIRED’s audience development manager, the answer is simple. “Our journalists aren't hanging out on Reddit," she said at the Audiencers Festival in London while explaining the reasons behind launching a forum app. The magazine gained 62,500 new subscribers in the United States during the first two weeks of February 2026, which shows that their audiences were eager for their content and connection to their writers. So the WIRED app would exploit their unique selling proposition: high-quality journalism powered by fact-checking, curation and their journalistic talent. Rather than leaving the forum respondent role to whoever happens to be online, journalists would answer reader questions directly, on the record.
The magazine already runs subscriber-only livestream AMAs (Ask Me Anythings) with its journalists, but having users spend time on a newsroom-owned platform could build a constant direct relationship with journalists. This might eventually become part of the outlet's brand, while assuring audiences of transparency on personal data usage.
At the same time, journalistic curation and moderation can also make forums a more accountable space. Although Subreddits and Facebook groups have community guidelines and moderators, they usually lack consistency, continuity, and fact-checked information. In 2025, New_ Public, a non-profit focused on building digital public spaces, asked its newsletter readers how they connect with neighbors online in a survey. One of the responses explained that Nextdoor's core failure was being "a firehose of data rather than a source of information.”
From a user perspective, unlike a discussion under Facebook or Instagram’s comment section, a forum provides a sense of community where users share a space with people who have the same concerns and interests. For newsrooms, forums could mean higher retention and engagement rates compared to standard article traffic, as well as a data-gathering and branding opportunity. While newsletters solve the owning-your-audience question, they lack an immediate and two-way conversation. Moreover, as Rob Golub argued in a Poynter opinion piece in 2024, revenue models can be strengthened when news products are built around genuine community relationships.
The numbers are clearest where newsrooms have already made the switch. When Mexican news group Milenio replaced Facebook Comments with its own community system, comments grew 150% in year one, according to Logora, the Europe-based platform behind the change. The comment widget became the outlet's fourth-largest registration source, pulling in 2,000 to 2,500 new registered users a month, and users who engaged with it spent nearly three times longer on the site than average (4:40 minutes instead of 1:48 minutes, self-reported numbers).
New_ Public’s Roundabout
New_ Public, led by The Filter Bubble author Eli Pariser and others, is building a healthier digital public space through Roundabout. Roundabout is led by Vox Media co-founder Trei Brundrett, who is Founder in Residence at New_ Public, and Blaine Cook, who was Twitter’s first CTO. The product looks like a Bluesky feed, and runs on the same distributed technology layer as Bluesky. On Roundabout, users can quickly find what they’re looking for via highlighted posts, a feed, guides, and an event calendar.
Currently deployed across several U.S. communities, including North Chattanooga (TN), Burlington (NC), Richmond (VA), Conestoga Valley (PA) and, as of July 2026, Southeast Portland (OR) the product is designed for communities of roughly 5,000 to 10,000 people. However, its two most active communities, Richmond and Southeast Portland, have significantly larger populations.
In all of the places where Roundabout has launched, people already turn to existing, active Facebook, Nextdoor, and Reddit groups and Instagram creators for information. Roundabout tries to gather all of that in one place, anchored by a paid "steward" who runs the local space and is usually an established voice in the community.
We conducted a landscape review of six Roundabout pilot communities. We collected quantitative data on every post and its interactions, although we note that the period of data collected spans the private beta of the platform and ongoing experimentation, so we are inevitably capturing some noise. Our analysis covers the period from each community's launch in November 2025 through June 2026 for the first five pilot communities, and through July 2026 for the latest expansion in Southeast Portland. After recording every post, its publication date, category, author, the author's role within the digital space, and the number of interactions and replies, we analyzed engagement patterns across the different Roundabout communities and compared them with those of other local online forums, such as Facebook groups and Subreddits.
Our findings hint at initial ideas as to what can make these spaces take hold and what holds them back from catching on. In North Chattanooga, the platform's best-performing content wasn't conversation — it was guides, which generated nearly three times the average engagement of other posts. On average, guides received 13 combined replies and interactions, compared to just 4 for regular posts. This points to a broader lesson for news organizations: the most successful forums may not begin as places for constant conversation, but for people to find genuinely useful information.
One area of inquiry for anyone looking to build a digital community space is the balance of posts from organizational stakeholders versus the general public. The steward in the North Chattanooga Roundabout wrote at least 67% of posts in the first seven months. That volume kept the space active, but did not translate into audience participation. Despite the steward regularly asking the community questions, and even though about 50 members posted something themselves at least once, the vast majority of the community never felt compelled to interact with the steward's posts at all.
The latest Roundabout, in Southeast Portland, clearly builds on lessons learned from prior launches. In its first two weeks live the community logged 129 posts and almost 2,500 replies and interactions, much more in a shorter window than any of the other five markets in their first weeks. Most postings (almost 40%) were people introducing themselves, followed by general posts, events and questions. The two stewards authored only 30 of the 129 posts – still a lot, but nowhere near North Chattanooga's 67% single-steward share. Whether all of this is a result of Southeast Portland's larger population, its later launch date, or something about how the two stewards are dividing responsibilities is a question the data alone can't answer. It's also too soon to tell if people who introduced themselves once keep coming back to the forum. Regardless, a clear strength and opportunity for Roundabout is the ability to coalesce experience and patterns as it expands.
On incumbent platforms, the imbalance between steward and audience holds even without a dominant single steward. In Evanston, hometown of Northwestern University north of Chicago, the main Reddit community, r/evanston, is a town-sized subreddit that attracts about 10,000 weekly visitors and roughly 750 weekly posts (data pulled July 14, 26). One of Chicago’s main subreddit forums, r/AskChicago, pulls roughly 302,000 visitors against about 11,000 posts (data pulled July 14, 26). Big or small, the pattern holds: the lurkers are the audience. The posters are the product.
Forums and Their Business Models
Launched in 2006 and having grown to serve 250,000 members in Vermont, Front Porch Forum became a family-run platform that unifies forums for hundreds of towns across the state. It makes the most conventional version of the business case: local businesses buy ads, the ads pay for staff, and the staff keep the forums functional enough that people keep coming. Additionally, people donate – in May 2026, Front Porch Forum’s spring fundraising campaign generated $200,000.
NewPress, launched in early 2026 by a group of Vox veterans led by Johnny Harris, has more than 50,000 members as of July 26. For $60 a year, paying members have access to one-on-one conversations with other members, live Q&As and a community of creator journalists that explain world issues. The free preview is a weekly "community chat." However, the company's main revenue still comes from advertising and brand partnerships inside Harris' YouTube videos, not from subscriptions.
Roundabout takes a different approach than Front Porch Forum or NewPress. It's a hyperlocal platform that's deliberately avoiding venture money in favor of a mixed funding model: membership, philanthropy, and some advertising. The bet, on paper, is on retention and source development — an audience a newsroom owns rather than borrows.
What are The Risks of Forums?
Building a forum from scratch is harder than it looks. The obstacle isn't technology, it's competition. Newsrooms are entering a landscape where people already have established places to ask questions, share information, and build relationships.
And the competition is only getting fiercer. In May 2026, Meta quietly launched a standalone app called “Forum” built around Facebook Groups. It describes itself as “a dedicated space for the conversations that matter most to you” and promotes “real answers from real people,” a framing that evokes Reddit.
Reddit itself has actively tried to attract more publishers to its platform. When they launched “Reddit Pro for publishers” in 2025, a tool that some newsrooms, such as The Dallas Morning News, are already implementing. The goal is to help outlets incorporate Reddit into their content distribution, allowing newsrooms to track where their stories are being shared and giving them recommendations of which channels they should be publishing them in.
The question isn't whether people want to talk online — they do and always will — but whether a newsroom forum offers enough value to pull them away from the dominant social media platforms they already use.
Perhaps the extra value is trusted reporting and curation, but there is scant evidence that is enough to interrupt users' current habits. Audiences are used to juggling different platforms to fulfill their needs, yet asking them to take a chance on a new platform presents a challenge.
Then, there is the moderation pitfall described earlier. New_ Public's own audience research points to a related risk: the two main reasons people leave a local digital space are that the information isn't interesting or relevant to them, and that these places get too negative or toxic. This means moderation in forums has to be held to a higher standard than that of comment sections. Moderation, however, is an ongoing effort and a recurring cost. Someone has to remove spam, de-escalate arguments, and absorb the legal exposure of user-generated content every day the forum exists.
When (not) to Build a Forum
Newsrooms might consider building a forum where there's real geographic or topical specificity, plus a brand people already trust, and staff willing to interact and moderate daily rather than weekly. But launching a forum to chase reach, or because a competitor announced one, is likely a failed strategy. Community management is not a launch task, but an ongoing commitment.
Whether organic depth and engagement ever arrive, or whether a newsroom's forum quietly settles into a well-designed ghost town, isn't something any pitch deck can answer in advance. The challenge is finding the fine line between building a loud forum overwhelmed by toxic content that fails, and a silent one where the publisher who built it ends up posting into a void. Here, community size itself may also be a factor influencing forum activity.
Some newsrooms have built successful community forums. But because it worked for some, it doesn’t mean it will work for everyone. If you work in news, the first step should be to assess your community and how people are getting their news. Who do they trust? Do they trust you? Does your team have the resources to experiment with a new product? Can you nurture this over a long period of time? And most importantly: How can you add value to what other platforms are already doing? If you answer affirmatively on these things, you are in a good position to test the forum waters. If you can't, maybe the next step is to explore how to build a place where you can give yourself the best chance of success.
