If you live in Medford, Massachusetts, as I do, I have some incredibly exciting news. A for-profit digital-only news organization is about to debut nearly three years after the Gannett newspaper chain all but abandoned the city. Gotta Know Medford is expected to launch with a website and a newsletter by the end of this month.
“We want to hold people accountable and make sure people are informed before they make decisions,” says co-founder Nell Escobar Coakley, who will be the site’s managing editor. She’ll be joined by two other co-founders, Wendall Waters and Chris Stevens. All three are veteran journalists who spent part of their careers working at Gannett and its predecessor chains. “We know what we’re doing,” Coakley says.
Gotta Know Medford will be free and advertiser-supported.
Coakley, in fact, is a former editor of the Medford Transcript, which ceased to exist in the spring of 2022, when Gannett merged it with the Somerville Journal. The merged paper, the Transcript & Journal, consists almost entirely of non-local news from across the chain.
Coakley, Stevens and Waters have been working to start a Medford news project for many months; Coakley says that Gotta Know Medford began coming together this past fall. That’s when the three of them connected with the Medford Chamber of Commerce, which in turn introduced them to Medford-based web developer Amanda Stone.
“We just saw the preview of our site, and we’ve just sent all of the revisions back to Amanda,” Coakley says, adding she’s thrilled with the design that Stone has come up with.
At least at first, Gotta Know Medford will be a part-time endeavor for Coakley, Stevens and Waters. Coakley is the part-time editor of Winchester News, a digital nonprofit, and she plans to continue with that for the time being. Stevens has been reporting for Winchester News as well.
“Those Winchester folks were really inspirational,” Coakley says. “They’ve been very helpful too in giving us advice and some ideas.” She also credited people involved in Greater Boston hyperlocal news, saying, “I find that people running these smaller news outlets, it’s a real community.”
Gotta Know Medford, Coakley says, will be a typical local news project, covering municipal government, development issues, arts and entertainment, and the like. School sports will be added somewhere down the line. There’s certainly plenty to cover, with issues such as a possible revision of the city charter and rezoning along Salem Street top of mind for many of us who live here.
Medford is not entirely uncovered. We have a Patch, which occasionally publishes an interesting story about the city, and students at The Tufts Daily do an excellent job of covering some Medford news. There is no substitute, though, for a locally owned, independent news outlet.
Now, a disclosure: I’ve been involved in trying to bring local news back to Medford since 2020. At that time the Transcript did not have a full-time reporter, a situation that dragged on for about a year. That was finally rectified, and I put my efforts on hold.
Then, in March 2022, the Transcript ceased publication. I gathered a group of local residents to see if we could organize a nonprofit outlet similar to Winchester News, YourArlington or Brookline.News, co-founded by my research partner, Ellen Clegg. Unfortunately, none of us were able to put in the time needed to start fundraising and begin the work of assembling an organization.
Next I approached a for-profit out-of-state chain that had a decent track record in moving to places vacated by Gannett and publishing good-quality newspapers. That effort appeared promising; at one point, the CEO even came to Medford for a tour, and the local group I’ve already mentioned took him and one of his fellow executives to lunch. Unfortunately, that company ultimately decided against moving ahead.
Nell and I have been in touch for at least a year, bouncing ideas back and forth as she considered whether to go for-profit or nonprofit and offer a print edition (she says it’s something she still might do at some point in the future) or publish online only. So, needless to say, I’m thrilled that she and her partners — a women-owned company, she points out — are finally about to restore local news to our city.