For many people across eastern Massachusetts over the past couple of years, the question has become less “if” you were profoundly disenchanted with what your local community newspaper under chain ownership but rather when you might get motivated to do something about it.
With today’s publication of its inaugural print edition, the Marblehead Current joins the ranks of news nonprofits that have sprung up increasingly within the footprint of Gannett, formerly known as Gatehouse Media, the parent company of the Marblehead Reporter, as Gannett increasingly abandoned local reporting.
One of the earliest such ventures, the online-only Bedford Citizen, was founded in June 2012 by three volunteers who had been active in their local chapter of the League of Women Voters, Meredith McCulloch, Kim Siebert MacPhail, and Julie McCay Turner.
A decade later, the Citizen now has multiple paid, full-time editorial staff members.
Then, the Ipswich Local News came along, co-founded by the late Bill Wasserman, former owner of North Shore Weeklies, a chain that included the Marblehead Reporter before it was sold, first, to Fidelity, then the Boston Herald before being spun off to Gatehouse Media, which became Gannett.
For Wasserman, the final straw came in June 2019, when Gatehouse merged his hometown paper, the Ipswich Chronicle, with two others covering an area that stretched from Middleton to Wenham.
Wasserman died on Sept. 29, 2021, at the age of 94, but the Ipswich Local News continues to be overseen by his co-founder, John Muldoon.
But for many — including the founders of this newspaper — the breaking point came earlier this year, when Gannett delivered the one-two punch moving nearly all the local staff reporters at its community weeklies to regional beats in February and then in March closing 19 weeklies and merging nine others into four. The Reporter was spared from the latter, but not the former.
A similar story as has happened in Marblehead has unfolded in Concord with its Gannett newspaper, the Concord Journal. Former Marblehead resident Margaret “Peggy” Burke – she arrived in town as an infant and lived here until leaving for college – had been talking with town officials and others in what became her hometown for years.
But over the past several months, Burke, the former director of the Concord Museum, and her co-founders former Select Board member Virginia McIntyre and Kate Stout, the founder, editor and publisher of the Map & Legend on Nantucket, decided to get serious.
In the spring, they launched their “Founders Campaign” to cover the start-up costs and create a cash reserve to ensure adequate cash flow for the first 30 months or so of operations for their news nonprofit, The Concord Bridge.
The first weekly print edition of The Bridge landed in mailboxes throughout town in the middle of October.
Burke described The Bridge’s fundraising efforts as “ahead of internal expectations,” noting that, after setting a goal of$1.13 million, they have raised just over $900,000. Aside from a small grant from the Knight Foundation, most of the money has come from the Concord community.
“I am hopeful that we will reach our initial goal by the end of 2022,” she said.
Asked what some of the biggest lessons she has learned from launching a nonprofit local news organization, Burke said, “This was much more work than any of us realized when we began the planning process in early spring. Our board is small, most of us are retired, and we each worked many, many hours to launch the paper.”
Burke expressed gratitude for the help The Bridge has received from more mature nonprofit newspapers and also spoke of the value of listening to the community.
“We did public forums in Concord and additional outreach to try to hear what the local community wanted its newspaper to be,” she said.
Despite the “mountains of work,” Burke said she would do it all over again.
“The positive feedback from the Concord community has been overwhelming,” Burke said. “We are still finding our way, but it has been a totally rewarding experience.”
Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy, who has been closely monitoring developments in the nonprofit news sector since the late 2000s, said that he had long been expecting an “explosion” of 501(c)(3) news organizations, but it was slow to materialize.
“I think part of it was that, for a number of years, the IRS made it really difficult for news organizations to get nonprofit status,” Kennedy said. “Then the IRS loosened its rules.”
But the other obvious explanation for the sudden rise is the actions of some of the country’s largest newspaper owners of newspapers.
“Gannett and Alden Global Capital, to name our biggest and most notorious newspaper chains, just began wiping out newspapers left and right,” said Kennedy.
Kennedy is writing a book with former Boston Globe editorial page editor Ellen Clegg titled, “What Works: The Future of Local News,” due in 2024, in which the Bedford Citizen will be featured. He and Clegg host an ongoing podcast series of the same name.
Kennedy attributes Gannett’s actions over the last year or two to the debt they took on to build their chain of 200-plus newspapers.
“They also seem to have lost interest in their weeklies,” Kennedy said. “They’re still interested in their dailies, although they are cutting them, too. But the weeklies in particular, they are just closing them wholesale.”
When Gannett decided to reassign its reporters to regional beats, it left those communities without local government watchdogs, while somewhat nonsensically offering content that well-established outlets were already producing, Kennedy noted.
“Isn’t that why we have the Boston Globe and two big public radio stations and some pretty good TV newscasts?” Kennedy said. “We really don’t look to our local newspapers for that kind of coverage. We look for what’s going on at town hall and in our neighborhoods.”
Kennedy noted the main benefit of a media organization establishing itself as a nonprofit is the tax advantages, both to itself and its donors.
“Beyond that, I think there is a public service mission to a nonprofit organization, whereas with a for-profit news organization, it could be locally owned, it could be operated for the public good, but there’s always that chance that it is going to be acquired by a chain or that it will pass into the hands of someone who isn’t really interested in that public service mission, and then what you had at one time starts to go downhill,” Kennedy said.
