A trio of veteran journalists prepares to launch a for-profit local news outlet in Medford, Mass.

Photo (cc) 2020 by Dan Kennedy

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.

Our local Gannett weekly has given way to a mash-up of regional news

Like COVID or an overdue tax bill, the debut issue of The Transcript & Journal made its unwelcome appearance in our home earlier today. The weekly paper is a mash-up of Gannett’s Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal, a move that was announced earlier this year as part of the chain’s decision to eliminate 19 Massachusetts weeklies and merge nine others into four.

Last week’s final issue of the Medford Transcript had local news on the front page — a story about a debate among city council members on whether they should continue to meet weekly or switch to every other week and a report on efforts to build a replacement for (or substantially renovate) Medford High School.

But the front of The Transcript & Journal, as promised, replaces all that with regional news such as the Fair Share proposal to implement a statewide tax on millionaires and the opening of new restaurants in far-flung locales such as Brighton and Kingston. Meanwhile, there’s nothing on a story reported by The Boston Globe earlier this week on a civil-rights complaint filed against the Medford Police Department in which two Black residents say they were unlawfully stopped.

There is one Medford article on the front — a feature on a 10-year-old walking loop that recognizes the city’s historic landmarks. It’s a good story about something I wasn’t familiar with. It was also written by a journalism student at Endicott College. Now, journalism students are some of my favorite people. But we see what’s going on here, right?

And that’s it for the A section other than press releases, obituaries and a story about restaurants at the Burlington Mall. The B section, devoted to local sports, seems pretty much unchanged, but it was thin to begin with.

At a webinar earlier this week organized by the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, Mizell Stewart III, vice president of news performance, talent and partnerships for Gannett and the USA Today Network, described the move as an attempt to drive digital subscriptions and to focus on local news that has a greater impact on people’s lives.

“Covering local news continues to be very labor intensive and very expensive,” Stewart said. The idea is to take “a more regional approach” and focus on “commonalities and trends.” But isn’t that why we have regional media like The Boston Globe, public radio and local TV newscasts?

This will not end well.

In Somerville, as elsewhere, tough times for local news

The Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism has an interview with Julia Taliesin, the only reporter at Gannett’s Somerville Journal, on what it’s like to work at an under-resourced corporate-owned newspaper. Key quote:

I am acutely aware that it is absolutely impossible for me to do justice to what the city deserves in terms of news. What Somerville deserves is a handful of reporters who watch every city council meeting, or at least 90% of them, because this city council is busy. When I think of what effective news looks like, it’s just that. It’s just enough people to cover the issues. Not the press conferences and the press releases, but the actual work and the legislating that goes on.

I should note that Somerville has more than 80,000 residents. Next door, the Gannett-owned Medford Transcript hasn’t had a full-time staff reporter to cover the city’s 57,000 residents since the fall of 2019.

GateHouse’s latest downsizing claims Somerville office

Earlier today I broke the news that GateHouse Media is closing its office in Somerville and laying off staff, with the Somerville Journal to be run out of the company’s Danvers office and the Cambridge Chronicle out of Lexington.

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/710501337662922752

https://twitter.com/dankennedy_nu/status/710503176022183937

That prompted this tweet from the Journal:

The Boston Business Journal followed up with additional details, including the fact that Wayne Braverman, a longtime GateHouse employee who’s a group managing editor, would be losing his job.

You need a presence in the community—a place where folks can drop in with an obit, a press release, or to give someone a piece of his or her mind. Local newspaper offices have become a rare species over the past 40 years, though some papers—no longer encumbered by the need to have their printing presses close at hand—have been reversing that trend.

I don’t expect readers of the Somerville and Cambridge papers will notice much difference, and I should note that the Medford Transcript is already run out of Danvers. But I moved from Danvers to Medford a little over a year ago, and let’s just say that the two communities are not close. And Somerville is probably another 10 minutes farther away. The Cambridge-Lexington connection isn’t quite as absurd, but how can a city as large and engaged as Cambridge not have its own newspaper office?

We’ve been having a robust conversation on Facebook about GateHouse’s latest move to squeeze out every last drop of blood from its hardworking employees. Please join in.