Last Thursday I had an opportunity to take part in a panel on the state of community journalism. I was struck by the nostalgia for print expressed by two editors who are many decades younger than I am, which is why I’m revisiting this still-relevant issue.
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The event, titled “Peril and Promise,” was a fundraiser for The Local News, a print-and-digital nonprofit founded a decade ago in Ipswich, Massachusetts. (Its print edition, as you can see, has a slightly different name: the Ipswich Local News.) The panel comprised Local News editor Trevor Meek; Taylor Ann Bradford, the editor of the H-W News, a fairly new nonprofit covering Hamilton and Wenham that offers print with a minimal digital presence (here is its Instagram page); Joel Barrett, news editor of The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, a chain-owned daily; and me. Moderating was retired editor Richard Lodge.
Meek and Bradford are both in their 20s, and I was impressed by the seriousness with which they take their responsibilities. I was also struck by how passionately they spoke about the importance of maintaining a print presence. Most of the community-journalism projects that I follow are digital-only. When the independent local-news movement started to build steam some 20 years ago, it was grounded at least in part on the idea that digital makes it exponentially easier and cheaper for anyone to become a publisher. The most prominent organization for local-news outlets is LION Publishers. LION stands for Local Independent Online News, and it has nearly 500 members.
Yet print has persisted in some places, and there are good reasons for that. Flipping through print issues of the two weeklies, I saw attractive ads for local businesses such as banks, a bicycle shop, builders, real-estate agencies, insurance agencies and restaurants — not to mention public notices placed by municipal government agencies. (Under current Massachusetts law, public notices must be placed in print newspapers.)
Howard Owens, who’s been publishing an online-only outlet in western New York called The Batavian for many years, likes to say that advertising is content. The Batavian, a for-profit, is loaded with ads. Most of the online-only nonprofits I’ve seen, though, have very few ads. Yet, as Owens suggests, readers like local ads, and they tend to be much more attractive in print than online. Advertising can be just as much a part of civic engagement as journalism.
“We are very reliant on print ad revenue,” The Local News’ executive director, Eric Gedstad, told me by email after Thursday’s panel.
It’s not just the affluent suburbs where print remains paramount. Two of the leading community weeklies in Boston, The Bay State Banner and the Dorchester Reporter, offer vibrant, ad-filled print editions. Then again, both the Banner and the Reporter were founded well before the web came into existence.
The Local News and the H-W News both rely on free mail delivery, but that’s not the only way to do it. Here are two more data points from Eastern Massachusetts:
◘ The Provincetown Independent, launched in 2019, offers a paid weekly print paper and paid digital. A digital-only subscription actually costs more than digital-plus-print because the founders, Ed Miller and Teresa Parker, want to distribute the advertising as widely as possible. The project is a for-profit public-benefit corporation with a nonprofit subsidiary, the Local Journalism Project, that accepts tax-deductible donations to support the Independent’s mission — including housing subsidies for its journalists to help them offset the high cost of living in a tourist area. (Disclosure: I’m a member of the nonprofit’s advisory board.)
◘ Taking the opposite approach is Beaver Dam Partners, a small chain of four for-profit weekly papers in southeastern Massachusetts, which relies on free digital and free print. But rather than incurring the cost of mail delivery to every household, publisher Anne Eisenmenger drops her papers at high-traffic areas such as convenience stores, banks and restaurants. The papers are known as Nemasket Week (Middleborough and Lakeville), Sippican Week (Marion, Mattapoisett and Rochester), Wareham Week and Dartmouth Week.
Visibility is another reason that print makes sense for some publications. If your project is digital-only, it can be difficult to get the word out about your existence. One digital nonprofit that has come up with an ingenious solution to this dilemma is The Bedford Citizen. Its website has little in the way of advertising. Once a year, though, it publishes a fat glossy magazine called The Bedford Guide that is filled with ads and is mailed for free to every home in town. Thus the Guide serves not only as a fundraising vehicle but as a way of introducing residents to the Citizen.
Now, I don’t want to make it sound like there’s a pot of gold at the end of the print rainbow. Gedstad told the 40 to 50 people who gathered for the panel discussion that Donald Trump’s tariffs had raised the cost of print, and that The Local News recently had to end free mail distribution in neighboring Rowley, though it continues in Ipswich. (The outlet offers some coverage in several other North Shore communities, too.)
Moreover, the gap between print and digital advertising revenues that had long characterized the newspaper business may finally be closing — not because digital ads are doing better but because print ads are disappearing. According to one study reported by Axios, newspapers were projected to earn slightly more ad money from digital than from print in 2026, with each revenue stream bringing in about $5 billion.
In community journalism, though, such macro trends aren’t especially relevant. Despite the proliferation of digital-only local-news projects in Greater Boston and nationally, print remains effective in many communities. Perhaps the most sensible approach is to start with a newsletter and a website, and to add a print edition if the data show that it will lead to growth in readers and revenues.
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