Mike Rosenberg, The Bedford Citizen’s first staff reporter and a community legend, dies while on the job

One of the best parts of writing about local-news startups is the opportunity to go out on stories with reporters to observe how they do their jobs. And so it was that on a midsummer day in 2021, I accompanied Mike Rosenberg of The Bedford Citizen as he toured the town’s new cultural district.

Mike, then 72, was the first paid staff reporter since the Citizen’s founding as a volunteer project nine years earlier. He died on Monday while he was covering a basketball game at Bedford High School, according to an account by the site’s managing editor, Wayne Braverman.

I’d like to share with you what I wrote about Mike in “What Works in Community News,” by Ellen Clegg and me. He was a colorful character, deeply devoted to his town and to the Jewish community, with a strong sense of ethics and fair play. My condolences to Mike’s family, the folks at the Citizen and all of those he touched over the years.

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Mike Rosenberg was walking along the Narrow Gauge Rail Trail, a dirt path that takes its name from the type of train that used to chug through the area. On this hot July morning in 2021, Rosenberg was reporting on the new cultural district in Bedford, Massachusetts, an affluent suburb about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Leading the way were Alyssa Sandoval, the town’s housing and economic development director, and Barbara Purchia, chair of the Bedford Cultural Council. The town’s planning director, Tony Fields, joined the group about halfway through the tour.

A couple of cyclists rode by. “Hi, Mike,” said one of them. Rosenberg returned the greeting and then said to no one in particular: “I have no idea who that is.”

It’s the sort of thing that happens when you’re among the most recognizable people in town. For decades, Rosenberg worked as a reporter and editor in his adopted community and then served as an elected official. In 2020, he returned to journalism as the first paid staff reporter at The Bedford Citizen, a nonprofit digital news site launched in 2012. At 72, an age when many people are retired, Rosenberg was taking notes, snapping photos and swatting mosquitoes.

Rosenberg pointed to his left, where a large new home — not quite a McMansion — stood alongside a tiny greenish house. All across Bedford, he said, newcomers with money were demolishing older homes and replacing them with oversized structures. “People are upset because it’s destroying the sense of neighborhood,” he said. “Every time there’s a teardown, people lose their heads.”

The new cultural district, Rosenberg’s guides hoped, would help preserve a sense of history in a community that was rapidly changing. They inspected landmarks such as Bedford Depot, where a commuter rail line was in operation as recently as the 1970s and is now the terminus of the Minuteman Bikeway, a 10-mile paved path that connects with Greater Boston’s subway system. They also stopped by Fitch Tavern, where the minutemen of Bedford, as legend has it, gathered on April 19, 1775, for a breakfast of cold gruel and warm beer before marching off to fight in the Battles of Lexington and Concord, as well as visiting a 1966 sculpture, “Dance Rhythm,” by Chaim Gross, installed on a plaza near the town hall.

Rosenberg probed, looking for some information he could use for the story he’d write.

“What are the benefits of having a cultural district?” he asked.

“It puts a wrapper around our cultural institutions and a focus,” Sandoval replied. “Can the district be expanded?”

“Yes, with state approval.”

“Will there be some sort of event to mark the unveiling of the district?”

“We’re thinking about it, yeah,” Sandoval said, explaining it couldn’t be done earlier because of restrictions that were in place during the unvaccinated months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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In the summer of 2020, following a COVID-induced delay, Rosenberg began work as the Citizen’s part-time community reporter — its first paid staff journalist other than co-founder and managing editor Julie McCay Turner, who had worked as an unpaid volunteer for several years after the site’s launch in 2012.

Rosenberg grew up in Rutland, Vermont, covering sports and politics for the Rutland Herald while he was in high school and then politics as a student at the University of Vermont. He moved to Bedford in 1973, taking a job as editor of the Tufts University alumni magazine in the hopes of being hired by one of the large city papers that served the area — which, in the 1970s, were The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald American. Instead, he was offered the chance to become the editor of the Bedford Minuteman, thus beginning a long career in community journalism. Rosenberg speaks with genuine passion about the years he spent covering his adopted hometown.

“Talk about divine intervention. The weekly was looking for somebody as a stringer,” he said, using the newspaper term for freelancer, “and, so, they hired me to cover school committee meetings. And, almost immediately thereafter, the editor announced she was resigning to run for the legislature. Although we had different styles, we both had the same philosophy. This is a sacred trust, and we’re responsible for it. This belongs to the community, and we have to tend it. We have to sustain and strengthen it.”

In those days the Minuteman was part of a small, independently owned chain of six weeklies, with the Lexington Minuteman serving as the flagship. The Bedford paper didn’t have its own office, so Rosenberg worked out of his home, pulling all-nighters at the Lexington headquarters once a week in order to lay out the paper and get it ready to be printed. “We did our own manual paste-up,” he said, referring to the process of assembling the paper with strips of typeset articles and hot wax. “It was a labor of love.” Rosenberg served a stint as editor of the Lexington paper — for “professional growth,” he explained — but didn’t particularly like it and returned to Bedford. A few years later, after the papers were sold to another local chain, Rosenberg left and took a job as an editor at The Sun, a daily based in nearby Lowell. He enjoyed the work, he said, but he quit the newspaper business in 1987 in order to spend more time with his family and to follow his growing passion for Jewish life. (The Bedford Minuteman closed in 2022.)

After leaving The Sun, Rosenberg became involved in community affairs, serving as an elected member of the Bedford school committee and the board of selectmen, later renamed the select board. He continued to serve as the public address announcer at high school football games and was involved in Bedford in other ways as well, as co-president of the town’s diversity committee and as a member of the tricentennial committee. (“It’s not for another seven years,” he said. “God knows some of us might not be around by then.”) Those ties became something of an issue when his term on the select board expired in March 2020 and he began working at the Citizen five months later. Rosenberg said he sought guidance from the state ethics commission, which told him he should refrain from covering any issues in which he’d been directly involved until he’d been off the board for a year. Still, Rosenberg’s entanglements speak to an ongoing issue at the Citizen: virtually everyone, paid and unpaid, is also deeply enmeshed in town affairs. “There’s always going to be some overlap,” he said. “And the question is, where are you going to draw the line?”

The many hats that Rosenberg wears speak to life in small-town independent community journalism. A chain newspaper company might assign to its weekly papers young reporters who would be bound by ethical rules forbidding involvement of the sort that Rosenberg engaged in. Those reporters, in turn, would invariably move on to better-paying jobs at larger news organizations before they could really get to know the community. Which is better? Reporters whose lives are rooted in the places that they cover or career-minded journalists who are just passing through?

Some years ago, the media scholar Howard Ziff wrote about that dilemma in describing what he called the “cosmopolitan” and “provincial” forms of journalism. Cosmopolitan journalism, according to Ziff, was based on traditional notions of objectivity such as maintaining a distance from the people you were reporting on and adhering to strict ethical standards. Provincial journalism, by contrast, harked back to an earlier time, when newspaper reporters were invariably people who grew up and lived in the places they were covering and had to balance truth-telling and independence with compassion and community involvement. Ziff quoted the editor of a group of small Connecticut weeklies as saying that big-city reporters “leave the bodies where they fall, we meet our victims face-to-face the next day in the local coffee shop.” The most important point Ziff made was that neither model is superior — they are just different, with each suited to different circumstances.