The nonprofit Swampscott Tides will water the news desert that Gannett left behind

For the past two years, the North Shore town of Marblehead has been a hotbed of local news experimentation, with two (and, for a while, three) independent community journalism outlets battling to fill the gap left behind by Gannett’s near-disappearance.

Yet neighboring Swampscott, a virtual twin of Marblehead, has remained a news desert. Now that’s about to change.

Four Swampscott residents, three of them with journalism backgrounds, plan to launch a new nonprofit digital news organization sometime in late autumn. The publication, Swampscott Tides, already has a website. Founding president Anne Driscoll tells Steve Marantz, writing in the Jewish Journal of Greater Boston, that she envisions “a fair and factual independent news outlet,” adding:

I think people in recent years have begun to recognize what a loss it is not to have a local paper. You can’t have a functioning democracy if you don’t have functioning journalism. You can’t get information on what’s going on, events, local politics, how municipal government is functioning.

The story in Swampscott is a familiar one. In the spring of 2022, Gannett closed or merged a couple of dozen weekly newspapers in the Boston suburbs. Although the Swampscott Reporter continues as a standalone weekly, it was purged of virtually all local news, with content from across the chain filling the news hole.

The same thing happened with Gannett’s Marblehead Reporter, which led to the establishment of the nonprofit Marblehead Current and the for-profit Marblehead Weekly News. A third for-profit, digital-only project, the Marblehead Beacon, is now on hiatus, and it’s not clear whether it will be back.

Driscoll told the Jewish Journal that the Swampscott folks approached the Marblehead Current about the possibility of forming a partnership but that the Current decided against it.

Driscoll has a long background as a journalist at The Boston Globe, Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Reporting and other stops. Her three colleagues are Robert Powell, a financial journalist; Tim Dorsey, a corporate lawyer; and Peter Masucci, who has worked in various roles in television journalism.

The organizers are aiming to raise $200,000 to $400,000 so that they can hire a managing editor and one or two reporters.