Town Square Is Still Open; You Just Have to Build It!

If you are reading this column, you are lucky, you still have a newspaper in your town. Thank them!  Many towns are not so fortunate, they have lost theirs.  The county weekly that smelled like ink and arrived on Thursdays, folded on the porch. The radio station where the morning host knew everyone by name. The TV news anchor who mispronounced local streets in a way only locals noticed. Those outlets were imperfect. They were late on some stories, silent on others. But they served a function that is quietly going extinct: they gathered the whole community into one shared room.

Nielsen’s 2025 data shows that audiences are splitting their attention between broadcast television, streaming services, podcasts, social media, and a growing constellation of niche platforms. The average American now toggles between 6.7 different social platforms each month. No single channel captures more than 20% of any given demographic’s attention.

The old town square is gone. But here’s the thing: the tools to build a new one have never been cheaper, more accessible, or more powerful. Small communities that figure this out first will have an enormous advantage in civic engagement, in local resilience, and in something harder to quantify but deeply real: the feeling of belonging to a place.  The blueprint is not complicated. It is, in fact, what old media companies used to do, but now distributed across a network of channels. 

Start with email. A neighborhood newsletter costs nothing to start and very little to scale. One remarkable example from the Strong Towns network: a neighborhood association in a mid-sized Canadian city launched an email newsletter in 2016 after a local zoning fight galvanized resident. Seven years later, it reaches an estimated one in three households, with an open rate consistently between 55% and 65%, triple the national average for marketing emails. The reason is simple: local information is irreplaceable. Nobody in your neighborhood needs help choosing between Netflix and Paramount+. They do need to know about the zoning meeting Tuesday, the pothole on Elm Street, and other purely local information.

Layer texting on top of that. A group text on a very inexpensive platform allows for real-time alerts, a road closure, a missing dog, an emergency city council vote. Text messages have an open rate north of 90%. They are read within minutes. They are the fire bell in the digital age.

From there, build a newsletter in the more traditional sense, a publication distributed digitally and, if resources allow, in print. The print version matters more than it may seem. It sits on the coffee table. It gets passed to a neighbor. It reaches the older resident who doesn’t use a smartphone. A community magazine, even a simple, black-and-white one will work.

Now think about social media, but with a discipline that most users abandon. Instead of trying to maintain a presence everywhere, pick one or two platforms where your specific community gathers. For many small towns, that might be a private Facebook group and a public Instagram account. For younger communities, perhaps a Discord server and a YouTube channel. The goal is not virality. The goal is consistency. Show up every week. Post the school board agenda. Share the photo of the kid who won the science fair. Celebrate the business that just turned twenty-five years old. Platforms come and go, but the habit of showing up doesn’t.

Podcasting is where the real magic can happen. Starting a podcast costs less than $100 in equipment and nothing in distribution. A weekly or monthly conversation between neighbors, about local history, about a contentious development project, about the story behind the diner that’s been there since 1962, creates something a tweet never can: it creates intimacy. The independent media world has proved the power of this model. The Free Press, started as a solo Substack newsletter by Bari Weiss, grew to over $10 million in revenue by diversifying into written work, podcasts, and events. That is not a model reserved for national political commentary. The same logic applies to a ten-square-mile watershed community or a neighborhood of four thousand families.

Finally, consider a YouTube or internet video channel. Filming a city council meeting, a school play, or a community garden harvest requires nothing more than a smartphone and a steady hand. Video is the most powerful communication medium in human history. It belongs in your community toolkit.

The fragmentation of media is real, and it is accelerating. But the media industry’s problem, too many channels, too little audience is a community’s opportunity. You need to reach the few thousand people who share your zip code. The tools are free or nearly free. Content is all around you. The only thing missing is someone willing to start. In most communities, that person is probably reading this column right now.  The town square was never really a building. It was the habit of paying attention to the same things at the same time. That habit can be rebuilt. The question is not whether your community deserves its own media or communication network. The question is who will build it.

John A. Newby, a Chamber President, past Publisher & Media Executive, Business Owner, Consultant, and International Speaker is the author of the “Building Main Street, Not Wall Street” column dedicated to helping local communities combine their synergies allowing them to thrive in a world where truly-local is being lost to Wall Street interests. His email is john@truly-local.org