Twitter will reportedly launch an ad campaign to help local journalists and news outlets gain more followers on the platform

• Twitter announced an ad campaign in support of local journalists and their work.
• According to Axios, Twitter will take out 28 full-page ads in newspapers across the US.
• The ads will point people to Twitter Lists of local reporters created the newspapers and Twitter.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Twitter will take out advertisements in 28 local newspapers across the US to encourage readers to support local journalists and news outlets, Axios first reported.

The ads will begin appearing Monday in 28 newspapers across the US, including USA Today and the McClatchy networks of local newspapers. The Cincinnati Enquirer, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, and the Kansas City Star, are among the local papers that will run the ad, according to the Axios report, published Sunday.

“Local journalists are so incredibly important to the conversation on Twitter,” Niketa Patel, the head of print and digital news partnerships at Twitter, told Axios. “We’re viewing this as a way of ensuring that Twitter is giving local journalists a national spotlight.”

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The advertisements will point users toward public Twitter Lists – the social-media platform’s feature that allows users to create lists of profiles and publicly share them – that feature local reporters and newspapers, according to Axios. The advertisements will also run on the local papers’ websites.

Twitter will also promote the hashtag “FollowLocalJournalists” and ask national journalists with large followings and other prominent journalism advocacy organizations to use it to share stories authored by local journalists and published at local outlets.

The company will also host several Twitter Spaces – the company’s live audio feature that aims to rival the live audio platform Clubhouse – with journalists from around the world from countries that include India, Thailand, and Brazil, according to the report.

“We think these two products in particular are a powerful part of the way journalists can have great conversations on Twitter and build a following,” Patel told Axios of Twitter’s List and Spaces features.

The campaign will continue for the rest of the year, Twitter said, according to the report.

The news industry, and in particular already struggling local news outlets, have been hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic, as the Columbia Journalism Review noted last year.