Shrinking local paper sparks startup news operation

When Jon Mitchell, the mayor of New Bedford, Mass., delivered his state of the city address in 2019, he made an unusual plea.

"Support your local paper," he said, referring to the Standard-Times, New Bedford's daily newspaper. "Your city needs it to function effectively."

Owned by Gannett, the parent company of USA Today and more than 250 other dailies, the Standard-Times was getting thin. Like thousands of newspapers across the country, it was taking on the characteristics of a "ghost" paper — a diminished publication that had lost much of its staff, curtailing its reach and its journalistic ambitions.

Now, two years later, the mayor's assessment is more blunt.

"We don't have a functioning newspaper anymore, and I say that with empathy with the folks who work there," he said in an interview.

He was so eager for the city to have a robust paper that he joined a group that explored buying the Standard-Times — but Gannett was not selling.

So when a cadre of journalists, including former editors of the Standard-Times, said last year that they planned to start a nonprofit digital news outlet to cover New Bedford, the mayor was all-in.

The mayor's vision of a trusted news source was similar to what the group of journalists had in mind when they created the New Bedford Light. With its newsroom still under construction in a refurbished textile mill, the publication went online June 7.

"There's a crying need in a complex city like New Bedford for in-depth, contextual, explanatory investigative journalism," Barbara Roessner, the Light's editor and former managing editor of the Hartford Courant, said in an interview.

The publisher is Stephen Taylor, a veteran journalist from the Boston Globe, which his family owned for generations, who has taught the economics of journalism at the Yale School of Management.

In its first week, the Light delved into the local effects of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 400 people in New Bedford.

In its second week, the Light looked at the city's surging real estate market, boosted in part by the pending revival of commuter rail service to Boston, defunct since the 1950s.

The Light, which has no print edition, is free to readers. It does not accept advertising, relying on donations, grants and sponsorships from local businesses. It plans deep community involvement, including media literacy workshops for residents who might become contributors.

It is largely following a playbook for digital nonprofit news sites prepared by the Institute for Nonprofit News, a group that guides startups and emphasizes editorial independence and financial transparency.

Although many of the local "powers that be" are backing the Light, its founders said that donors would have no role in editorial decisions and that there were no sacred cows — not even the supportive mayor.

(Lisa Strattan, Gannett's regional editor for New England, who oversees the Standard-Times, did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)