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Cambridge Day founder Marc Levy is back with a new Cambridge and Somerville news hub
The mission: give locals a platform to stay informed and take part in civic conversation. As their tagline says, “We’re all in this together.”
A new local newsroom has launched in Somerville and Cambridge, aiming to fill a coverage gap as other area papers shutter or scale back.
The publication, Cambridge Somerville Independent, debuted online on Feb. 12, featuring stories on local government, developments, music, literature, and food reviews.
The site is the brainchild of Marc Levy, the same guy who started another local newspaper still in publication, Cambridge Day, over a decade ago.
So far, “it’s been really rough,” said Levy, who still working out the kinks of the new website.
But the group decided to launch anyway because Valentine’s Day was coming up and they a had a lot of holiday content.
“We really launched this sort of a do-or-die,” he said.
“I think he’s still processing why he did what he did,” said Jason Pramas, the executive director at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. “But he decided to go off and start another publication covering both Cambridge and Somerville.”
Who is Marc Levy?
Levy grew up in California and first came to the area to attend Emerson College, and moved to Cambridge in 1994.
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For a time, Levy relocated to work as an editor at a local Connecticut newspaper and would often make the two-hour drive back to Cambridge on the weekends, even opting to work remotely from Diesel Cafe in Somerville. Eventually he made the move back to Cambridge.
Levy found Cambridge and Somerville to be “amazingly interesting,” with so much going on, from celebrity visits to poetry readings, live music, and dance events.
But the main source of local news at the time, the Cambridge Chronicle, was being gutted of its resources after what was once a family-owned paper was eventually bought by GateHouse Media, which then joined with Gannett in 2019.
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So, he decided to start his own paper.
After a first attempt to start Cambridge Day in 2005, he returned to the project in 2009.
“I kept wanting to do more and more to make up for the stuff that wasn’t here anymore,” Levy said.
Cambridge Day began as a one-person operation, expanded to include Levy organizing a group of citizen journalists, and then to freelance writers. For most of the time, Levy subsidized Cambridge Day with his day job.
But as local news continued to decline, a group of citizens established a nonprofit news organization called Cambridge News Inc., led by a community-based board. In 2024, the nonprofit acquired Cambridge Day.
After Cambridge Day made the executive decision to focus its coverage mostly on Cambridge, Levy didn’t agree, he said. After a year, he decided to part ways.
The start of a new paper
After months of pulling together the workings to start a website, Levy is now committing his full attention to the paper while working with a small team of writers and photographers.
One of the team members is Michael Gutierrez, who will serve as the Arts editor and will help Levy with writing the paper, strategic planning, website management, and more.
“I’m excited… to help launch the CS Independent and turn it into the best local news outlet serving Cambridge and Somerville,” Gutierrez wrote in an email to Boston.com.
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The CS Independent will operate a hybrid model with a commercial wing and a nonprofit wing. While the site will host advertisements, readers can also donate to the paper through the Somerville Media Fund.
“I would like news sources to endure for the communities that they serve,” Levy said. “I take very seriously the idea that communities are better when their citizens are connected and that they have a way to connect and understand each other and what’s going on in their community.”
Levy takes this mission seriously, saying it’s a civic responsibility to fill this gap in news coverage.
“There’s still a need,” he said.
The competition
BINJ’s Pramas notes that Cambridge and Somerville have limited local news coverage. The Cambridge Chronicle closed in 2022. The local Patch doesn’t cover local news so much as host state-wide stories. The Somerville Times does do local coverage, but it is a small operation.
Then, there’s the Tufts Daily, a student-run publication that only runs during the school year. Of course, there is the Boston Globe, which recently started the Camberville newsletter.
But, Pramas argues, it’s not enough.
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“I want more news to be out there,” Pramas said. “I know Mark’s a really great journalist, and he really knows the communities that he’s covering better than anybody.”
Pramas said that “it’s a boon” for these communities to have Levy reporting on them.
He added, “I also think a little bit of competition never hurt anybody.”
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