Tag: Lexington Minuteman

The Lexington Observer’s unusual revenue stream: acting as a conduit for other news outlets

The Adams Building, in Lexington Center, is named for Alan Adams, who published the Lexington Minuteman on its premises. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.

The Boston Globe has just published a fascinating story (sub. req.) about The Lexington Observer, a hyperlocal digital nonprofit through which flows a surprising amount of money. Media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that the Observer isn’t just covering its affluent community of 34,000. It also serves as a conduit for other news operations across the country.

As Ryan puts it: “The news organization has handled millions of dollars in donations in recent years, something many small nonprofit newsrooms could only fantasize about. Only a small share of the Observer’s operational revenue comes from local donors and ads. The outlet instead survives largely on fees it collects by helping other news organizations across the country raise money.”

Between 2023 and 2024, the Observer reported in tax filings that its expenses rose from $640,000 to nearly $5 million — most of which ended up in the hands of other local news outlets.

“You see other nonprofit or local newsrooms do other weird things to make money. This just happens to be ours,” Co-founder and board chair Nicco Mele is quoted as saying. Mele is a former executive director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

Also involved in the Observer’s fundraising effort, known as the Local News Hub, is Lauren Feeney, a journalist who is executive editor of both the Observer and the Hub, and Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, an Observer board member who’s the co-founder and former chief executive of the National Trust for Local News.

The Lexington Observer — like a number of startups in Greater Boston — was launched in 2021 in response to the Gannett chain’s hollowing out of the town’s longtime weekly newspaper. In this case it was the Lexington Minuteman, whose history I wrote about here.

The Trust is a nonprofit that owns and operates newspapers in Maine (including the Portland Press Herald), Colorado and Georgia. Ellen Clegg and I interviewed Hansen Shapiro for our book, “What Works in Community News,” and our podcast.

In Lexington, a slice of local newspaper history

I thought you might enjoy a little slice of local newspaper history that I dug up Tuesday while doing some research. Mike Rosenberg of The Bedford Citizen once told me that Alan Adams, the former owner of the Lexington Minuteman and, eventually, five other papers, had a building named after him. Today I located the building and learned a little bit about Adams.

First, the building. It’s right next to the Minuteman Bikeway in the center of Lexington, across Meriam Street from the Lexington Visitors Center on the other side of the street. It’s pretty nondescript if you view it from the bikeway, since you’re looking at the side of the building. From Mudge, though, it’s quite striking — white and brick with four large white columns, with “Adams Building” written across the top. It has long ceased to serve as a newspaper headquarters and today mainly comprises professional offices.

Adams died in 1975 at the age of 70. According to his obituary in The Boston Globe, he began working at the Lexington Minuteman (also known variously as the Minute-man, or the Minute-Man) in 1930, and bought the paper in 1932. He also served as a local politico. Among other things, he chaired the Republican Town Committee and held elected office as a town selectman. Presumably he got good press. Obviously it’s not the sort of conflict that anyone would tolerate today, but it wasn’t that uncommon at the time.

From Richard Kollen’s history of Lexington. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume this photo isn’t protected by copyright.

According to a 2004 book by Lexington historian Richard Kollen titled “Lexington: From Liberty’s Birthplace to Progressive Suburb,” Adams used the Minuteman’s pages during World War II to promote wartime measures such as keeping the lights turned off at night so that the pilots of any incoming German bombers wouldn’t be able to see their targets. Adams also admonished his fellow townspeople for not taking those precautions seriously enough, once writing: “Seven stores were reported with unsatisfactory preparations and … all too many houses have not taken care of their porch lights properly.”

Adams sold his papers in 1971, according to the Globe obit. I’m not sure what their immediate fate was, but I know that at some point they were combined with another local chain called Beacon. The Beacon-Minuteman Corp., based in Acton, was eventually acquired by Fidelity’s Community Newspaper Co., then by Boston Herald publisher Pat Purcell, and then GateHouse Media, which merged several years ago with Gannett.

Today the Lexington Minuteman is a shell of what it once was, though it was among a handful of Gannett weeklies that escaped being targeted for shutdown or a merger during a recent round of cost-cutting. Adams himself represented a different era in local journalism — one that was ethically lax in some respects, but that served as the voice of the community in ways that we rarely see anymore.