Local-Oriented Online Communities in Urban Communication Infrastructures: News Media, Engagement, and Emotion in 128 North American City Communities

<p>Local-oriented online communities (LOOCs) have become ubiquitous spaces for discussing national and local news as well as urban civic life, yet existing scholarship lacks a consistent framework to explain what shapes their behavioral and emotional outcomes across diverse contexts. This study applies Communication Infrastructure Theory (CIT) to conceptualize LOOCs as meso-level storytellers whose outcomes are shaped by their connections to broader storytelling networks. Analyzing 1,613,650 posts and 32,706,953 comments from 128 North American city subreddits over the full year of 2024, we examine how connections to mainstream media, local media, urban governance topics, and everyday urban life topics predict thread-level engagement and emotional expression. Results show that both mainstream and local media connections substantially increase engagement but correlate with more negative emotional expression. Urban governance topics increase behavioral engagement but elicit negative sentiment, whereas everyday urban life topics exhibit the inverse pattern, showing an engagement–negativity tradeoff.</p>