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Medford is the latest place to see a news outlet rise from the ashes. But it’s far from the only one.
In towns or cities which lacked local coverage for years, these start-up local news sources are filling the gaps.
Chris Stevens was driving in her car in late January. Wendall Waters had traveled to Florida with her Great Dane to visit her parents. And Nell Coakley had her finger over the “Publish” button to formally launch Gotta Know Medford, a local news publication the trio had been planning for months.
“We weren’t even all in the same state,” said Stevens, who resides in Nahant. “No champagne pop or anything. All of a sudden, we were live.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh, crap. Now I need to get writing.’”
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Gotta Know Medford is the latest in a recent spurt of local news outlets to come out of Massachusetts. In areas with no specific town or city coverage, these papers have filled in long-standing gaps.
The co-founders of Gotta Know Medford knew each other while working for papers owned by Gannett, the largest U.S. news publisher. Stevens was at the Marblehead Reporter as a multimedia journalist, Waters covered the environment with WickedLocal.com, and Coakley, a managing editor for the company, had been a longtime writer and editor at the Medford Transcript, which merged with the Somerville Journal in 2022.
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By the end of 2022, all of them had been let go after massive company layoffs.
Each person found jobs afterward in and out of journalism, but believed bringing a hyperlocal news outlet to Medford for the first time in years would bring something much needed to the community.
“We decided that we needed to do something, that people need local news,” said Waters, an Ipswich resident.
The group had a lot of ambitions in the beginning: podcasts, food reviews, and short social media videos were all planned in addition to regular news coverage. But when logistics got harder to manage and people opted out, they were “back a square one,” Stevens said.
Eventually, they settled on only launching a website with enough money to sustain itself for the next few months.
How are these local papers financially supported?
Many new online newspapers in Massachusetts apply to be nonprofits for grant opportunities, tax benefits, and to move away from the traditional business model. A lot of funding, though, comes from individual donors and partnerships with businesses.
Sam Mintz — the founding editor for Brookline.News, a local city publication that launched in May 2023 — said the site has an entire team of volunteers dedicated to fundraising efforts.
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“It’s not what people are used to when you talk about how you sustain a newspaper, but it has worked for us so far,” Mintz said. “There is a lot of uncertainty … will people keep donating at the same rate that they are now? Will other sources of funding dry up? These remain big questions for us.”
But for Gotta Know Medford, the team decided to go down a for-profit route. Initially concerned about access to grants, Stevens said that a conversation with Nicci Kadilak at the Burlington Buzz — a site launched in 2022 that consists of Kadilak, a web designer, and a columnist — reassured the trio that sources of funding are available to for-profit organizations.
“It’s all a tremendous amount of work because the three of us are doing it all, but being a nonprofit just adds some more steps to it,” Stevens said. “I just want to write.”
Mintz was the only person on staff at Brookline.News for more than one year, but the network of board directors and volunteers gave enough support for the organization to have projects like an investigation into an oil spill in the Muddy River and a map of Brookline neighborhood names.
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“You can’t do it alone, even with a small staff,” Mintz said. “Finding people who are willing to commit time and care about the community and care about creating a good newsroom has been one of the things that has really helped us succeed.”
What has been the community response?
Mark Pothier worked at the Boston Globe for over 20 years, and before that wrote for small weekly newspapers and even had a career as a musician. A Plymouth resident for three decades, Pothier was approached by a group of other residents in 2023 to ask if he would like to be the editor of the new Plymouth Independent.
“Helping to bring back local news to a town that’s growing as fast as Plymouth, it felt [like I] made a bigger impact doing that than staying where I was part of a much larger organization,” Pothier said.
He had previously worked at the Old Colony Memorial in Plymouth, becoming the executive editor in 1986. Like many other local papers, Old Colony was also bought by Gannett and eventually stopped providing local news to the town.
Pothier said the absence of news in Plymouth led to some difficulties for his new outlet when interacting with public officials. The Boston Globe reported in January that Town Manager Derek Brindisi complained about being taken out of context in an Independent article about noise complaints around a waterfront condo development.
“Officials weren’t accustomed to being held accountable or being asked tough questions, and they didn’t have to do that for years,” Pothier said. “We are asking those questions on behalf of the public.”
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While that relationship improved, others, such as with the police department, are still proving difficult to manage.
For Gotta Know Medford, Stevens said the reception so far has been “amazing.” They met with the mayor, the school superintendent, and many city council members already, she said.
“Residents are excited because not only do they know what’s going on, or they’re beginning to learn what’s going on, but they also have someone to vent to,” Stevens said. “They’ve been a wealth of story ideas.”
The group hopes the new venture is successful enough to allow them to transition out of their other day jobs and to hire more staff members.
Solving the news desert issue
“News deserts” have become an ever-pervasive problem across the country, leaving some communities in the dark about what is happening in their small governments or local businesses.
Before coming to the Globe, Pothier successfully earned a Neiman Fellowship by writing an essay about his concern with the future of journalism, and he says “all of the things that I feared and more have come to fruition.”
“If you take away news at the local level, which has happened across the country, it is just like the foundation on a building eroding, and we know what happens after that,” Pothier said. “The whole thing can come tumbling down.”
Wendall Waters said start-ups like Gotta Know Medford will naturally “fill a void” when a community goes too long without a local news source.
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“People love, love, love their local paper,” Stevens said. “That’s where you’re going to read about your kid’s Little League team … or what your selectmen said at the meeting the other night, or when that ambulance or that fire truck goes whipping by your house.
“You know what happened because there is somebody there to report on it.”
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