This article was originally published by Northwestern University’s Medill Local News Initiative and is republished here with permission.

PLYMOUTH, Mass. – Mark Pothier was wrapping up the young-adult phase of his music career, including a 1983 stint as keyboardist for the then-synthy band Ministry, when he took a $5 an hour job for the Pembroke Reporter, a recently launched community paper along Boston’s South Shore. Pothier rose through the ranks of the umbrella Memorial Press Group, a chain of suburban newspapers, and in 1986 was named executive editor of the flagship, the Old Colony Memorial in Plymouth.

Plymouth is a sprawling coastal town with a population barely exceeding 60,000 but a land mass about twice the size of Boston’s. The quaint business strip is lined with visitor-friendly boutiques, shops and eateries, including a homey, worn-wood-floored coffeehouse where Pothier chats with fellow residents. Walk down a couple blocks to reach the Harbor, the home of Plymouth Rock and a full-size replica of the Mayflower.

An oversized blue rocking chair on Main Street welcomes visitors to Plymouth, Massachusetts, ‘America’s Hometown.’ This coastal town, known for its historic landmarks like Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower replica, offers a charming downtown filled with boutiques, shops, and eateries that capture its rich heritage and inviting atmosphere. (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

The place oozes history, and the weekly Old Colony Memorial, founded in 1822, was the epitome of a legacy newspaper. Pothier felt the weight of those years on his shoulders.

“I thought it’s my privilege to be a caretaker of it, nurture it, grow it into the 21st century, and then it will carry on,” he said. “Most of us were pretty naïve about the newspaper industry.”

Cut to 2023: Pothier had been an editor at The Boston Globe for 22 years, and the Old Colony Memorial, like dozens of Massachusetts community papers, had become a “ghost paper” — that is, a newspaper that nominally continues to exist but has been stripped of most or all local news reporting. Over the past several years, the Gannett chain, which had taken ownership of the Old Colony Memorial and dozens of other community papers and assembled them under the Wicket Local umbrella, has gutted or shuttered numerous Massachusetts local weeklies.

What’s happening in New England is being echoed across the country as the local news crisis deepens. While the nation’s ever-widening news deserts have drawn much attention, the ghost papers represent another dire threat to a well-informed citizenry. Many areas don’t meet the definition of a news desert, but residents have been left with newspapers so hollowed out that they’re bereft of original local news reporting.

Newspapers increasingly have fewer and fewer reporters to cover local stories; since 2005, more than 60% of newsroom jobs have vanished. In the suburbs of large cities like Boston, mass consolidations from newspaper chains can exacerbate this problem. As part of the 2024 State of Local News Report, Medill researchers reviewed 500 papers owned by the five largest newspaper chains and found that, on average, more than a third of front-page content originated from a nonlocal source.

Aware of these dynamics, Walter “Robby” Robinson, the Boston Globe investigative reporter who led the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Spotlight” investigation into sexual abuse among Roman Catholic clergy, had a proposition for his fellow Plymouth resident, Pothier. Robinson had joined the boards of startup news outlets in that town and the larger nearby city of New Bedford.

“Both of them are in communities allegedly served by Gannett papers,” Robinson said, noting that Gannett’s New Bedford Times also has drastically cut back local coverage in a city of 100,000. “In Plymouth, the Old Colony Memorial has no reporters. Yet they still publish. And they publish Gannett crap.”

A request for an interview with a Gannett representative about the company’s Wicked Local strategy and its apparent shift from hyperlocal to regional coverage among its community papers — and a query about whether “ghost papers” is a fair or unfair term — yielded this emailed statement from “a Wicked Local spokesperson”:

“With deep roots throughout the greater Boston area, the content produced by our journalists is relevant for readers across our coverage area. Our Wicked Local publications remain focused on providing reliable, community-focused news while leveraging the power of the USA TODAY Network to ensure continued coverage as we implement new strategies to reach our audiences.”

Mark Pothier is the editor and CEO of the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit digital news outlet that debuted in November 2023. (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

Agreeing that the Old Colony Memorial had been “completely strip-mined,” Pothier understood what Robinson, with his “gravitas and deep voice,” was asking. “He essentially said to me I needed to do this, I needed to be the editor,” Pothier said. “It was a full-circle thing for me. I was the ideal person to helm this. It took some convincing for me to give up the Globe job to do this, but I realized everybody leaves their job at some point.”

Pothier now is editor and CEO of the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit digital news outlet that debuted in November 2023. The larger-staffed New Bedford Light, also a digital nonprofit, was launched in June 2021 and offers in-depth reporting about the fishing industry, wind energy, arts and culture and other local matters.

These startups have much company in the Boston metro area and beyond, as new outlets — mostly digital nonprofits — have been emerging to fill the gaps left by the ghost papers. Many of these outlets aim not only to replace their faded predecessors but to improve upon their coverage and to be more relevant for current readers.

But not every community has the luxury of banishing the ghosts.

“You can’t go 20 feet without running into a new startup, which is great,” said Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University journalism professor who writes the Media Nation blog and co-authored the 2024 book “What Works in Community News.” “The problem is they tend to be located in the more affluent areas. You can have a community that has something really good, and right next door is a community that has nothing.”

Dan Kennedy, Northeastern University journalism professor and co-author of the 2024 book ‘What Works in Community News’, notes the surge in local news startups, saying, ‘You can’t go 20 feet without running into a new startup, which is great.’ (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

The communities with nothing are at risk of becoming news deserts, where residents are cut off from what’s happening locally — and thus from the ties that bind people together and help them make informed decisions. Can the surge of local news startups reverse the industry’s downward trajectory of the past many years? Or will the ghost papers continue to haunt communities in desperate need of reliable reporting and information?

The answers are being sought in Massachusetts.

A Wicked Local world

K. Prescott Low has regrets.

“It’s heartbreaking,” Low said. “It makes me very, very sad to see what’s happened — not just in Massachusetts or in the Boston area or in Plymouth but across the country with the news deserts. I grew up with the understanding that a well-informed electorate was important for all sorts of reasons. Given the demise of newspapers and rise of social media, I think the public is less well informed than they were in the 20th century, and that’s unfortunate.”

As the fourth-generation publisher of the Patriot Ledger, a daily paper based in Quincy on Boston’s South Shore, Low played a part in this sad transition. Now retired and living in Florida, he also was CEO of G.W. Prescott Publishing, which bought the Memorial Press Group and Old Colony Memorial in 1979.

The business “was in the family for four generations,” he said. “We cared a lot about the community, and we lived in the community, and we thought essentially we were stewards of the newspapers, not out to make a bundle. That’s not what the newspaper turned into, especially with the inception of the internet in the 1990s.”

During that decade Low saw large media companies regrouping and pooling resources to deal with the digital revolution. The family-owned Boston Globe was sold to The New York Times in 1993 for a reported $1.1 billion (and was bought in 2013 by John Henry for a reported $70 million, making it the rare major daily to return to family ownership). Low didn’t see how he could compete.

“As an independent newspaper company, we just didn’t have the resources to play that game and to stay it out—to think that in 10 or 20 years that we would be a survivor,” Low said. “It was clear to me that we were going to be roadkill.”

In 1998, Prescott Publishing sold its properties to Newspaper Media LLC, a company that owned the Enterprise, a daily paper in Brockton. “The people that we sold it to were by far the closest to those who would honor the culture and the traditions,” Low said. “The fact that these people owned a complementary footprint in southeast Massachusetts was attractive in scaling up the footprint of the Patriot Ledger and Memorial Press Group to better serve the communities.”

But that’s not what happened.

“Conceptually it was a good idea,” Low said. “Practically it didn’t work out because of the subsequent purchase by GateHouse and what has happened across the media.”

Low could only sit back and watch as his former papers changed hands multiple times, with GateHouse Media buying the cluster in 2006. GateHouse merged with Gannett in 2019, and the combined company took the latter’s name.

Gannett has stockpiled community papers around Massachusetts, assembling them in a network that GateHouse had dubbed Wicked Local. The word “Local” may as well be in quotes because these outlets have deemphasized local reporting in favor of regional content that can be shared across the papers.

In March 2022, Gannett merged nine of its Massachusetts weeklies into four and shuttered another 19. The surviving papers shifted their focus to shared regional news rather than specific local reporting.

The Medford Transcript and the Somerville Journal had covered their communities just northwest of Boston before Gannett took them over and combined them to create one weekly for both towns: The Transcript & Journal. “This business decision reaffirms The Medford Transcript’s and Somerville Journal’s commitment to the sustainable future of local news,” Gannett said in its March 16, 2022 story announcing the merger.

“They didn’t just merge them into one paper,” said Kennedy, a Medford resident. “They basically removed all local news from both papers. Most weeks it has nothing from Medford or Somerville. It’s a complete ghost newspaper.”

Front page of the Transcript & Journal, dated November 14, 2024, featuring stories on veteran employment programs, a state healthcare symposium, and a 51-year-old library book’s return to Worcester Public Library. Despite covering topics from nearby towns, the paper offers limited local reporting for communities like Medford, which faces challenges as a growing news desert. (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

The front page of the Nov. 14 issue, which contained two six-page broadsheet sections and had a newsstand price of $2, included a story about two state agencies creating a program to aid veterans’ employment, a centerpiece about a state healthcare symposium in Boston, a feature story about a 51-year-old library book returned to the Worcester Public Library (Worcester is more than 40 miles from Somerville and Medford) and a teaser about a story celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Paper Store, which has its corporate offices about 20 miles away in Acton. None of these stories had a Somerville/Medford angle.

The Your News section on page 2 of the front section offered a few short press releases provided by the City of Somerville and arts organizations, with no independent reporting.

“If you go to their Wicked Local websites, it’s the same thing,” Kennedy said. “It’s news from around the chain. For the most part, they’re just stuff from 10 towns over, and they’re of no interest to anybody.”

Plymouth is more than 40 miles south of Somerville and Medford, and the front page of the Nov. 14 Old Colony Memorial offered the same stories about veterans’ employment and the state health symposium, with the library book feature replaced by a piece, lifted from the Patriot Ledger, with the headline, “How the South Shore voted in the election.”

The Nov. 14 front page of the Coastal Mariner, a Wicked Local paper based in the town of Scituate, was identical to that of the Old Colony Memorial in Plymouth, more than 20 miles down the coast. The Coastal Mariner is the result of Gannett’s merger of the Scituate Mariner, Cohasset Mariner and Marshfield Mariner.

Despite being published 20 miles apart, the front pages of Gannett’s papers in Scituate and Plymouth, Mass. are identical. These pages from Dec. 5 carry no stories local to the communities they serve. (John Volk/Local News Initiative)

“This business decision reaffirms The Scituate Mariner’s, Cohasset Mariner’s and Marshfield Mariner’s commitment to the sustainable future of local news,” Gannett said in its March 16, 2022 story announcing the merger.

As Kennedy reported in his Media Nation blog, Gannett also merged the Arlington Advocate and Winchester Star into the Advocate & Star and the Saugus Advertiser and Melrose Free Press Observer into the Free Press & Advertiser. In addition, Kennedy listed 19 print weeklies, which served at least 26 communities in Eastern Massachusetts, that Gannett had closed.

“The current round of closures follows the revelation several weeks ago that staff reporters at nearly all of Gannett’s Massachusetts weeklies would be assigned to regional beats, pulling them off bread-and-butter coverage of local government and community events,” Kennedy wrote in March 2022.

Although Medford is home to Tufts University, it now lacks a local news source aside from the Transcript & Journal. And Medford is no mere college town but a racially and demographically diverse city with a population of close to 60,000. Kennedy considers it a news desert, at least for now.

Other communities have sprung into action.

New voices

An illuminated sign reading ‘CHEEKY MONKEY HOME,’ a remnant from the storefront’s previous occupant, hangs above the entrance to The Belmont Voice office. Despite the sign, the young weekly publication reaches 11,000 households in Belmont, Mass. (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

“CHEEKY MONKEY HOME” reads the illuminated sign in front of the Belmont Voice’s storefront up a walkway from the town’s Leonard Street business strip. The leftover sign from the space’s previous occupant may be the only element out of date with this young weekly already showing up in each mailbox of Belmont’s 11,000 or so homes and businesses.

“Everyone gets it for free,” said Bob Rifkin, the Voice’s co-president. “That’s part of our plan, and then we can tell the advertisers the whole town gets it. We need to make sure it’s a high-quality paper and is accepted by the town.”

Rifkin had spent his career as a portfolio manager for firms such as Wells Capital before retiring in 2020, and aside from writing sports stories for his college newspaper, he didn’t have much journalism experience when he joined this nonprofit venture. But as a longtime Belmont resident who raised his family in this suburb west of Boston, he realized he no longer knew what was happening in town.

“There was a ghost paper,” he said, referring to the Gannett-owned Belmont Citizen-Herald, which combined the Belmont Citizen and the Belmont Herald back in 1988. “People still got it, but there were no more local stories, and there were no more local ads.” Belmont-related Facebook pages, where Rifkin said residents sniped at each other, were not an adequate replacement.

So when Anne Donahue, a retired Boston University journalism professor and former next-door neighbor, asked Rifkin to apply his business experience to a serious journalism venture in Belmont, he was enthusiastic about creating not the Belmont Citizen-Herald 2.0 but something better.

“I never thought of myself as someone who’d want to ask people for money, but once we did the work on this thing and figured out how it could work, and we had the right people around, I felt great about going out and asking for money,” Rifkin said. “I’d do the pitch, and people would get on board, and we could get going.”

The Belmont Voice’s editor-in-chief, Jesse Floyd, has all the Massachusetts community newspaper experience that Rifkin lacks. In 1996 he became an editor in the Community Newspaper Company, a collection of more than 100 Massachusetts weekly, semiweekly and monthly papers assembled by the Boston-based Fidelity Investments in the 1980s. “They were great to work for because they spent a lot of money,” Floyd said.

The Boston Herald bought the group in 2001, and GateHouse took over in 2006, rebranding it Wicked Local in 2011. In recent years Floyd was managing editor of Gannett’s Northwest Group, a cluster of 36 papers northwest of Boston. He ended his 27-year tenure in the organization in 2023, taking a buyout “to keep my sanity,” and returned to his community news roots in Belmont.

Startups in nearby communities offered successful templates for the Belmont Voice to pursue when it launched in January 2024. The nonprofit Concord Bridge, in a suburb about 11 miles northeast of Belmont, also is a print paper distributed to all 8,700 of the town’s households while maintaining a news site and receiving robust local advertiser support.

Front page of The Belmont Voice, dated November 8, 2024, a weekly print newspaper published in Belmont, Mass., typically spanning 12 to 16 pages. (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

The Belmont Voice usually is 12 pages long, sometimes 16, and includes four to five pages of ads that total about $5,000 a week in revenue, Rifkin said. The direct costs of producing and distributing the paper — layout, design, printing and nonprofit marketing mail (11 cents a copy) — amounts to about $3,000 a week, so that’s a $2,000 weekly profit, he said. Additional revenues are needed to support the journalists and their reporting, which is where donations come in.

“We have over 40 donors that gave over $5,000 and over 600 individual donors,” Rifkin said. The hope is for 20 percent of Belmont’s homes — about 2,000 — to give $12-a-month/$120-a-year, which would total $240,000 annually. Rifkin said the Voice already was “cash-flow positive in our first year” and expects to be again in 2025, with a $500,000 budget.

“We’re pretty well balanced,” he said. “If we didn’t have the print operation, we’d have to make a lot more money off of donations because digital advertising isn’t a big contributor on a small paper.”

Nonetheless, the surge of Massachusetts startups has been more digital than print oriented. In Needham, a Boston suburb of 32,000 about 11 miles south of Belmont, the Gannett-purchased Needham Times ceased publication in the spring of 2022, announcing that it would “exclusively offer news online.” But Gannett doesn’t maintain a Needham Times webpage, instead directing readers to the generic wickedlocal.com site.

Jeanne Hopkins, a Needham resident and 32-year communications executive at the Boston public radio station WGBH, said she and her husband, veteran journalist Peter O’Neil, would complain: “We have no newspaper; no one knows what’s going on.”

So O’Neil and fellow Needham resident and journalist Frederica Lalonde started reporting and posting stories for the new nonprofit Needham Observer, and they enlisted the recently retired Hopkins to help with the infrastructure and funding. She is the Observer’s executive director but also writes, edits and takes photos because it’s that kind of operation.

“Little by little, people came forward,” Hopkins said. “We’ve got about a dozen people in various capacities writing, editing and (doing) production.”

Launched in May 2023, the Observer posts stories on its website and sends out a weekly newsletter, with about 3,200 subscribers so far. “We’re free and want to be free and welcome their donations,” Hopkins said, noting that the Observer also has raised some grant money and is looking into sponsorships a la the public media model. “We’re hoping to tap into some higher-level philanthropy because we think there are some people in town who might provide more, but we’re not necessarily connected to them yet.”

She added: “We’d really love to get to the point where we can start paying people because we think journalists should be paid. It was a grassroots effort to get it started, and now we need to make it sustainable.”

Reversing the ‘nationalization of news’

Brookline, the tony community that borders Boston to the southwest, doesn’t fit the profile of a news desert, yet when Gannett ended the Brookline Tab print edition in 2022, the town felt the loss.

“Your libraries, your schools, your zoning, housing — there’s so many local issues that directly affect how people live,” said Ellen Clegg, a longtime Boston Globe editor who co-wrote “What Works in Community News” with Kennedy. “Housing costs are through the roof in Greater Boston. People are concerned about the quality of the schools.”

That reporting was gone, as was something that’s less measurable. “City and town identity is very important in New England,” Clegg said over a casual Japanese lunch near the Brookline-Boston border. “My concern is that gets lost when you aren’t talking to people, when you aren’t reporting on the texture of a community.”

So Clegg became a steering committee and board member of Brookline.News, a nonprofit digital outlet that has become the primary news source for the town’s 65,000 residents. Sam Mintz, who previously worked at Politico and the Cape Cod Times, was hired as its founding editor in April 2023, and the site launched the following month.

None of that would have been necessary, Mintz said, if Gannett hadn’t shut down the Brookline Tab and offered no local news on the Wicked Local website. (As with the Needham Times, the Brookline Tab online address now defaults to the generic Wicked Local site.) “Brookline.News exists because the Brookline Tab essentially ceased to exist,” Mintz said.

The necessity of such local coverage became especially clear to Clegg when a young man was said to have been seen with a gun near Brookline High School. “He had shown it to somebody and then was on the run, reportedly, and an email goes out to all the parents, who then panic, and the school’s in lockdown,” Clegg recalled. “Rumors are flying on Facebook. There were rumors that he had fled to Boston and was in some kind of standoff.”

It was up to Brookline.News to separate fact from fiction. “None of that was true, and it was a BB gun, and he had been swiftly detained by police,” Clegg said. “We jumped on it really quickly to try to talk to the police, to talk to the schools, to post something (saying) this is what’s really happening.”

As local news outlets have dried up and news deserts have spread, a “nationalization of news,” as Clegg puts it, has taken place, with cable networks such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN driving the increasingly partisan discussions. “I think it replaces concern about local issues in our brains.”

Yet local issues often don’t break down along party lines. “We all live our lives locally,” Clegg said. “This is where I educate my kid in Brookline schools. That’s where I shop. That’s where I get my car fixed. And those local issues don’t neatly map onto the red-blue divide.”

Clegg cited a recent Brookline.News forum with the town’s transportation director. “There were a lot of seniors who showed up, and they do not want bike lanes,” Clegg said. “They’re environmentalists, but they’re worried about mobility and about getting knocked down, so, you know, they’re development issues.”

Mintz said that the vast majority of Brookline.News’ funding comes from individual donors, with some foundation grants and ad money also in the mix. “I think we have several clear advantages: the proximity to Boston, which has so much academic talent; the education level; engagement; atmosphere; and the wealth of Brookline helps too when it comes to fundraising,” Mintz said. “If we can’t make this work in Brookline, I’m not sure it could work anywhere.”

Said Clegg: “These startups in Brookline and Marblehead and Newton and Needham and Concord — these are wealthy communities, by and large. You don’t see it in the gateway cities like Lawrence and Lowell and Chelsea — ’gateway city’ being defined as a mid-size urban area that was once an industrial hub and is coming back. So that’s an issue. You also don’t see it in rural towns. It’s tough. It’s harder when you don’t have an NPR-like donor base.”

Making up for what’s been lost?

When Mark Pothier successfully applied for a Nieman Fellowship in the late ’90s before moving from the Old Colony Memorial to The Boston Globe, he had to submit a long essay. “I wrote about my deep concern for the future of community newspapers,” he said. “At the local level, weekly newspapers are extremely important because that’s where people interact with their government. If that eroded, I really worried about what would happen. Fast forward 24 years, and here we are.”

During Pothier’s time as its executive editor, the Old Colony Memorial had “an incredibly robust newsroom,” with eight to 10 reporters, four or five editors plus full-time photographers and designers, he said. Now, aside from some sports stories, its local content is almost nonexistent.

In the late 1990s, Pothier said, the Old Colony Memorial’s weekly circulation reached about 18,000. Finn said an ad sales representative for the paper told him a few months ago that it is now roughly 3,000.

The Plymouth Independent reports 778,000 monthly unique visitors since its November 2023 launch, 2.2 million pageviews and almost 23,000 newsletter subscribers as of Dec. 10, 2024.

“It’s very sad to me to see the demise of the Old Colony Memorial,” Pothier said.

Yet it continues to exist — a ghost of its former self.

“You might ask, ‘Why do they still publish?’ and the reason is because they make money,” Robinson said. He cited a Massachusetts law— “a relic from the pre-internet days”—requiring legal ads to run in print papers. “You have a situation where nonprofit news startups which deserve to be supported somehow have to have a print edition in order to get legal ads. So in Cambridge, the (Gannett-owned) Cambridge Chronicle also has no reporters, yet they still publish, and the reason is they were getting all of the legal ads from the City of Cambridge, which at one point was $180,000 a year. So their costs are minimal because they really don’t have a staff.”

The legal-notice debate is taking place in states aside from Massachusetts as well. When a government body circulates a public notice involving property (such as a foreclosure), business or other legal matters, many states require legal ads to be placed in the local newspaper for a certain duration. Digital-only local news outlets complain of being excluded from these revenues while print papers, even those with no local content, cash in.

“There are efforts being made to change the laws so legal notices don’t have to be in print,” Hopkins in Needham said. “If they could be online, that would be a source of revenue.”

But Bob Ambrogi — a lawyer, legal journalist and executive director of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association — argued that “publishing public notices only online would have the effect of disenfranchising many of the state’s citizens.” He said in an email that many citizens lack reliable internet access or “are not sophisticated about using the internet or searching for information on government or news websites.” He also cited the “digital divide” that skews internet access against “those who are poor, elderly, minorities, handicapped, rural, or less educated.”

“I personally have several older relatives who struggle to do anything online or on their phones,” Ambrogi said. “Yet they religiously read their local newspaper. … They know that the newspaper is where those notices have always appeared and that that’s where they can find them still.”

Legal ads or not, local news sites around Massachusetts have been finding ways to support their journalism. Lean Camara, CEO of the New Bedford Light, said her ambitious outlet’s revenues break down to about 60% percent from individuals, 30% from grants and foundations and the rest from events and business sponsorships.

“We don’t have it structured as a membership model, but we do solicit on a regular basis,” Camara said, noting a springtime match program and incentives for year-end donations.

One area where the New Bedford Light is not seeking revenues is a paywall. “Paywalls perpetuate inequity,” Camara said. “We want people to have reliable information no matter whether they can pay for it.”

Lean Camara, CEO of The New Bedford Light, and Karen Bordeleau, executive editor of The New Bedford Light, discuss strategies for supporting their journalism, including paywalls, grants, and business sponsorships. (Mark Caro/Local News Initiative)

Karen Bordeleau, a former Providence Journal executive editor and senior vice president who recently became the Light’s executive editor, would love to see those revenues grow to boost the Light’s in-depth reporting. “In a perfect world,” she said, she would hire an economic development reporter and dig deeper into the thriving fisheries industry, the offshore wind industry, the growing arts community and more. “There’s a lot of economic development going on and I would love to cover that better,” she said.

Yet maintaining reader support has become a challenge. Since the New Bedford Light launched in June 2021, “revenue has increased every single year,” Camara said. But, she added: “This year is very much a transition, uphill-battle kind of year. It’s very natural for startup donors in year three to think they can reduce their contributions. There may not be growth this year.”

Such a pattern is not unusual, said Troy Finn, CEO of Catalyst Campaign Partners, which offers fundraising counsel to nonprofit organizations such as Harvard University and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. After seeing Finn speak at a conference in January about the differences between transactional charity and relationship-based philanthropy, Robinson called him to consult with the fledgling Plymouth Independent. Finn began working with that nonprofit digital outlet in the spring and also now is consulting with Brookline.News, the Newton Beacon and Cambridge Day, which the nonprofit Cambridge News Inc. acquired in late November with plans to expand its newsroom.

Finn’s perspective is that many publications, as well as the Institute for Nonprofit News, focus too much on a “transactional model” — selling subscriptions or memberships to readers and soliciting small gifts from many sources. “I don’t know long term how sustainable or healthy that is, and that makes me kind of nervous,” Finn said. “People think of the news in a very transactional way: ‘I donate what I used to give in my subscription.’ Getting them to see it as a philanthropic priority is the trick.”

Finn noted that the Plymouth Independent has 18,000 free subscribers and has received about 2,000 gifts for an average of less than $100. “Ninety percent of subscribers, their most motivated readers, they’re not motivated to support (the Independent),” Finn said. “Converting subscribers to donors is really tough.”

“In the last five years,” Robinson said, “it’s a lot easier to make the case to people that funding a nonprofit news outlet is as good for the community as funding the local ballet or symphony or museum or hospital. People sort of get it. You don’t have to explain the importance of local news anymore. But you’re competing with every worthy charity in the community for dollars that are hard to come by.”

To Finn, a more sustainable future lies in news outlets inspiring philanthropists to give major gifts because they want to be part of the mission. That’s what happened with a Plymouth family who recently pledged $1 million to create an endowment for the Independent on the condition that other donors contribute an additional $1 million. Finn said this family became inspired to say: “I want to do something big. Can you help me do something big?”

As these new outlets figure out their revenues and boost their coverage, can they make up for what’s been lost on the local news landscape?

“That’s an interesting question, whether it’s making up for what’s been lost or bringing forward something that people know is needed.” Hopkins in Needham said. “It’s a generational thing in a way. So many young people didn’t grow up with newspapers, don’t look for news that way. I think the older cohort that is used to newspapers maybe sees it as ‘making up for,’ but I think it’s trying to add something to the way that people are getting news now—because people think they’re getting news when they’re getting a lot of opinion, and young people don’t always know the difference, which is really unfortunate and concerning.”

Said Robinson: “I’m optimistic about the future of nonprofit news, but I wouldn’t kid myself. It only goes partway toward filling the gap left by the abdication of journalism by these big chains.”

Then again, Finn said, he doesn’t think Gannett and other chains could have kept all of their local reporters and coverage and not lost their shirts. “Their No. 1 priority is profit,” Finn said. “Of course, they are compelled to do what they have to do to turn out the highest profit. For hyperlocal news, I don’t think the for-profit model works.”

So the editors, publishers, CEOs and others at these young local news organizations are figuring out what does work — and reestablishing the presence of journalism in their towns. After watching 25 cars blow through red lights over 40 minutes at two intersections, Pothier wrote a Nov. 7 column about drivers ignoring traffic signals in Plymouth. Much of the piece wound up detailing the not-too-illuminating exchange between him and Police Chief Dana Flynn, who insisted on answering questions only in writing.

When Pothier asked why patrol cars aren’t periodically stationed “at intersections notorious for violations,” Flynn responded with such bureaucratic mumbo jumbo (“Sector cars have the discretion to direct their traffic enforcement to areas they deem appropriate based upon their observations, times of day, traffic conditions, officer and operator safety, or other factors”) that Pothier wrote: “This was beginning to sound like an email exchange with J.D. Vance.”

“It’s amazing to me to come back to this environment and deal with people who aren’t used to being covered,” Pothier said between sips of his latte at Kiskadee Coffee Co. on Main Street. “It’s kind of shocking how little they understand about how journalism works. They talk to me about how we need to build up trust with the Plymouth Independent. I said, ‘Whatever we publish, that’s all you need. We’re not going to be friends. That’s not how it works. But we don’t have to be enemies either.’”