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{shortcode-24643cedbe14221289878261864001a8ceef067a}n a typical day, Marc Levy pulls himself out of bed in the late morning, goes to Diesel Café in Somerville, orders a Vietnamese latte, and gets to work on the Cambridge Day — a local newspaper he founded in 2009. When the cafe closes at 7 p.m., he returns to his home in Cambridge and continues working on the publication until well after midnight.
For over 16 years, Levy has been the Day’s sole full-time staff member: writer, editor, proofreader, publisher. Standing at the helm, he keeps one of the only surviving local papers left in Cambridge from going under.
The paucity of local media in Cambridge reflects a national shift in the viability of local news. Studies conducted by PEW Research Center and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism have found that while Americans consistently state that they see value in local news, audience engagement and the number of available jobs at local news stations have fallen. The exodus of advertisers from print to the internet has left many newspapers struggling for funds. And the rise of social media — with its abundance of free, if not always accurate, information — has thrown the relevance of traditional news outlets into question.
Together, these factors have led to the emergence of news deserts — regions with few local outlets and little local coverage.
It’s difficult to say whether Cambridge is a news desert. While the Day is one of the city’s primary outlets for local news, it’s not the only one. Spare Change News, a street newspaper operating out of a church basement on Massachusetts Avenue, publishes a local news section in its monthly print edition. The Harvard Crimson, the publisher of this magazine, is perhaps Cambridge’s best-staffed source of city news, with 18 reporters and two desk editors on its Metro desk alone. The Boston Globe reports on Cambridge and Somerville through its “Camberville” section. And while Cambridge Community Television, a public access station in Central Square, doesn’t do traditional news reporting, it gives residents the tools and training to broadcast local stories across their three channels.
Below the surface, however, many of Cambridge’s outlets struggle to function — and those that survive often do so at the cost of their staff. CCTV had to cut its news program shortly after its main staffer left in 2018. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Spare Change News has downsized from nearly 70 to just under 30 vendors and was forced to move from printing bi-weekly to monthly editions. While the Globe has expanded its regional coverage, Cambridge is not the paper’s primary focus. The Crimson is run by full-time students, rather than journalists, some of whom are asked to work upwards of 40 hours per week on top of their academic commitments. Until recently, the Cambridge Day was one man with a day job reporting on a city of 118,000 people.
Cambridge presents a unique landscape for news reporting. Home to Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, more than 250 biotech companies, and a cost of living 70 percent higher than the national average, Cambridge is a hub for wealth and power. At the same time, it’s a place of socioeconomic strain: The poverty rate is 12.4 percent, and only about 15 percent of housing units in the area are considered affordable. Without a robust local media environment, the city’s manifold stories may go unreported.
The fragility of Cambridge’s media ecosystem raises questions of what a sustainable model for local journalism looks like — and what the city loses when local news disappears.
Working Overtime
{shortcode-69a9ed06c887cb075e6988b5c6d61980cc21c96c}arc Levy answers the Zoom call with a tired smile. His black henley shirt is half-unbuttoned, and he constantly runs his hands through his disheveled white hair. When we ask how he’s doing, he sighs. “I’m burnt out,” he says.
Levy discovered his passion for journalism over thirty years ago as a reporter for The Berkeley Beacon, the student paper of his alma mater, Emerson College. The buzz of the newsroom, the camaraderie of the student-journalists — he wished it would go on forever. He dreamed of starting his own newspaper as a way to “bring the team back together,” he says.
Though a California native, Levy remained in New England after college. He worked at a series of papers across Massachusetts and Connecticut before returning to the Boston area in 2009. There, he founded Cambridge Day. Until 2023, he worked a day job as the senior editor of Cheapism.com, a product recommendation site, and funded the Day primarily through his own paychecks.
Though he has a team of part-time freelance writers — many of whom are college students in greater Boston — Levy takes on the bulk of the work to keep the Day running. Every aspect of the Day’s operation is Levy’s responsibility: the majority of the writing, finding freelancers, and proofreading, editing, and publishing articles. “Unfortunately, it is largely just me at the center of everything,” he says.
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The Day publishes daily on its website and weekly in print, covering topics ranging from the deaths of residents to City Council controversies, from faculty discontent in Cambridge Public Schools to events held by local businesses. But with such a small team, stories inevitably fall through the cracks.
“There’s so many stories that I just have to let go, because there’s not the person power and the time and the energy to take it on,” Levy says. If the paper had the bandwidth, he would like it to report more on “everything,” he says.
Two miles away from Diesel Café, where Levy works on the Day, stands The Harvard Crimson, Cambridge’s other major source of metro news. The 152-year-old student paper remains largely untouched by the resource troubles plaguing other local publications. The Crimson has 390 active editors across 10 boards: on any given weeknight, the building’s central newsroom is bustling with reporters. Last year, the paper brought in more than $1 million in revenue.
Even so, The Crimson’s status as a student-run newspaper puts constraints on its content. Its reporters are full-time students, not full-time journalists, balancing work for The Crimson with academic commitments. The organization can be demanding: A list of descriptions for each masthead position, circulated annually during The Crimson’s internal elections, notes that the President should expect to work more than 60 hours hours every week (and sometimes more than 100), while the Managing Editor should expect to “drop anything and everything — school commitments, personal commitments, family commitments — to take care of the paper.” The intense hours aren’t only reserved for the paper’s top leadership. In 2022, a beat reporter wrote about the organization’s institutionalized culture of overwork.
Though the Day and The Crimson are arguably the primary sources of Cambridge local news, they both lack paid, full-time staff. The papers are powered by burnt-out college students and a burnt-out Levy, all working late into the night, nearly every night of the week.
Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts
{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he state of local news in Cambridge hasn’t always looked so stark. For decades, Cambridge was home to the oldest weekly newspaper in the United States.
The first issue of The Cambridge Chronicle, published on May 7, 1846, is lined edge to edge with thin black print. Articles about the impending acquisition of the Oregon territory and the inauguration of Harvard’s newest president are crammed side-by-side with marriage announcements and an inventory of Brighton market’s weekly animal stock.
The Chronicle’s mission statement, outlined on the second page, defines the importance of a newspaper as a “chronicle of the times” — not necessarily by the major events it records, but by “the collection of incidents which for the time seem to be of little import.”
For more than 175 years, the Chronicle published every Thursday, consistently filling more than 16 pages of newsprint with local stories.
In 2006, however, the Chronicle was purchased by the publishing company GateHouse Media. When Amy E. Saltzman joined the Chronicle in 2012, the paper was already beginning to buckle under its parent company’s staff cuts. “It was already the downhill of local news,” she recalls.
The Chronicle’s story played out across the country, as the rise of the internet tanked readership and threatened advertising revenue. Papers cut costs, laid off staff, discontinued print editions, and sometimes even shuttered completely. Others, like the Chronicle, found themselves consolidated under the control of large media corporations: Gannett, Knight-Ridder, McClatchy, GateHouse Media. Since 2005, the U.S. has lost one third of its local news outlets.
When she started at the Chronicle, Saltzman felt overwhelmed by the number of stories Cambridge had in store. “It was like a fire hose of information,” she says.
Five months into her tenure, the Boston Marathon was bombed by Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev. The brothers had immigrated to Cambridge from Kyrgyzstan as children and graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. “That was an international story and also a very Cambridge story,” Saltzman says. She felt she had to “hit the ground running.”
Though the Chronicle’s staff had shrunk in recent years, Saltzman wasn’t working alone. In her first year at the paper, the Chronicle had an editor, a reporter, an editorial assistant, a freelance budget, several photographers, and an office in Somerville.
But the staff hemorrhage showed no signs of stopping. In 2019, Gannett — a mass media conglomerate — merged with GateHouse Media, taking ownership of the Chronicle. Saltzman was soon left as the paper’s only full-time journalist.
“It became unsustainable for me, personally,” she says. “But also, from a quality standpoint, it just got really hard.”
Saltzman left the Chronicle in October 2021. Her replacement, William J. Dowd, left in 2022, less than a year after being hired. The paper has not had a full-time reporter since.
The Chronicle’s death is part of a broader trend across Gannett’s holdings. In May 2022, the conglomerate halted the print editions of 19 different local newspapers in Massachusetts alone. That August, they laid off around 400 employees across the country, with no intention of filling the vacant positions. They laid off roughly 200 more employees a few months later.
The Chronicle’s fate, Saltzman says, “shows what I had always seen working at Gannett, which is that they really didn’t care about journalism, at least on a local level.”
In an emailed statement, Gannett spokesperson Lark Marie-Antón wrote, “The Cambridge Chronicle and Tab has deep roots throughout the Middlesex County area, and we remain committed as ever to the quality coverage our valued readers depend on despite false allegations from former employees.”
Online, the paper survives as WickedLocal.com, an aggregation of regional news stories published by other Gannett papers. At the time this story was written, WickedLocal.com’s front page contained articles about a sandwich shop in Marshfield, the rescue of a FedEx driver in Wellfleet, and a high school basketball game in Plymouth. The site uses the same blue, black, and white formatting that Gannett applies to all of its digital papers.
Despite having left the Chronicle years ago, on WickedLocal.com’s staff page, Saltzman is still listed as the editor.
A Bid to Save the Day
{shortcode-e64d65eabc2c8945c17364f3d09655b667e30e03}evy was also struggling to hold on to his job in media. In March 2023, he was laid off from Cheapism.com. As a result, he lost his primary source of income, which he had been using to sustain both himself and the Cambridge Day.
Levy began to look for other ways to finance the Day. Like many media owners seeking to keep their outlets alive, however, he found that securing funding wasn’t simple.
In 2022, he entered into talks with Cambridge News Matters, an informal coalition created to protect local journalism in the city. As part of their mission, members of the organization were interested in acquiring the Cambridge Day. Two such executives on the board directly involved in the talks were Mary McGrath and Richard A. Harriman.
McGrath is a Boston native who has worked in journalism for more than 30 years. From a family of journalists, she currently serves as the executive producer of OpenSource, a weekly radio show on WBUR. Over time, she’s noticed the disappearance of sustainable local journalism — especially in Cambridge, where she has lived for the past eight years.
Harriman works on the business side of Cambridge News Matters. A Cantabrigian for more than 50 years, he first became interested in local news while serving as chair of the board of the Cambridge Community Foundation, which primarily works to fund local nonprofits and improve economic mobility.
After many talks with Levy on how to move forward, Cambridge News Matters officially acquired the Day in November 2024, becoming the nonprofit Cambridge News Inc. in the process. The agreements for the acquisition included that Levy would continue writing and editing for the Day, while the nonprofit would manage the paper’s finances. According to the nonprofit’s website, they are now looking for an editor-in-chief, publisher, and several reporters to add to the paper.
While Cambridge News Inc. is unique to the city, nonprofit models for funding local news have become increasingly popular across the U.S. “There’s a movement around the country of people trying to fill in the gaps in communities with local news,” says McGrath.
McGrath concedes that journalism isn’t seen as profitable — but her work with Cambridge News Inc. raises the question of whether it needs to be. Unlike the for-profit model of legacy outlets and media conglomerates like Gannett, the nonprofit model allows journalists to write without revenue at the front of mind. According to McGrath and Harriman, this enables broader and more in-depth coverage of local issues — something their organization see as essential to democracy.
But the nonprofit model is not a silver bullet. Critics of the model find it overly reliant on philanthropy, and nonprofit newsrooms across the U.S. continue to struggle with limited resources.
Since the acquisition, Levy has expressed some reservations about his partnership with Cambridge News Inc.
Among them, he claims that while he would have preferred to be an equity partner in the Day, the board of Cambridge News Inc. wanted him to be an employee. He ultimately conceded ownership of the paper, becoming a salaried reporter and senior editor.
In an emailed statement, Harriman wrote, “We value and honor all that Marc has put into Cambridge Day over a long period of time and are delighted in the agreement where Marc will stay on, following his passion for reporting and editing as we build strength in the business of publishing and editing.”
Levy also says that the board of Cambridge News Inc. has been slow to respond to his recommendations for the Day.
“One of my proposals to the board was to hire another me,” he says. “Hire another person that can do basically anything, even if not super amazingly well. Double the output and reduce the burnout.”
Levy has found it difficult, however, to move forward without board approval. “I’m sort of waiting on the board to find out what direction they might want to go for anything,” he says.
Another proposal was to hire a “fast-turnaround” person who would regularly publish shorter reported stories — everything from breaking news to a restaurant opening — on the Day’s website. “I wish I could do that, but I have not gotten a response yet,” Levy says.
Harriman wrote in an email that the group of citizens who approached Levy to acquire the Day had limited funds. According to Harriman, they used the money they had to buy the assets of the Day, transform Cambridge News Matters into the nonprofit Cambridge News Inc., and provide Levy with a full-time salary with benefits.
“When adequate funds are available, additional hires will be made,” he wrote. “In the meantime, two boards have been formed — an operating board at Cambridge News Inc. and a Local News Fund board at the Cambridge Community Foundation. A fundraising consultant has been hired who is helping to convene focus groups in the city, and the board is working with Marc to make improvements in the paper.”
Nonetheless, Levy is excited by the doors the partnership may open for his paper. Before the acquisition, Cambridge News Inc. had already raised $62,000 for the Day. Shortly after, they brought on moderators for the Day’s comment section, Levy says, taking some work off his plate.
“Long story short, I’m optimistic,” says Levy. “I think that everyone involved is doing what they think is best for the community.”
An Outlet for Change
{shortcode-be29865d8a9c7908fa05930b7f2d42574eaa573c}n 1998, Samuel Weems worked an odd job at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church. Every night, he would lock the doors of the stone building, moonlight filtering in through the stained glass. Occasionally, he would run into a man named Randy Eck, who repaired computers in one of the basement offices. They would talk casually, and Weems would follow Eck to learn more about the computers, unaware that both Eck and the technology were a part of Spare Change News, a street newspaper with offices in the church’s basement.
One Saturday, Eck asked Weems to come in on Saturday to help out “the guys” in Spare Change News’ computer room.
Spare Change News challenges the traditional idea that journalists should be removed from the issues they report on. The paper primarily covers homelessness and poverty — but it’s also explicit about its goal of empowering homeless and economically disadvantaged people.
Spare Change News was founded in 1992 through the Homeless Empowerment Project by about two dozen individuals experiencing homelessness, including the former president of the Spare Change board, James Shearer, who passed away in 2023.
The paper publishes original reporting by freelancers and reporters from the Boston Institute of Nonprofit Journalism. They also republish articles from other street newspapers. Vendors — many of whom are experiencing homelessness themselves — buy the papers from the Church’s office for 50 cents each and sell them for $2, keeping the proceeds they make. Some also write for the paper.
After that first Saturday, Weems started to come in every week, helping out with the paper whenever he could. And when Eck was ready to move jobs, he asked Weems to take his place.
Weems has now been with Spare Change News for 27 years. He currently serves as a Spare Change board member, helps run the distributional management office, and creates the puzzle page on the back of the paper.
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Weems tells us that the paper has been instrumental in many of the vendors' lives.
“We do know for the most part, that those who leave [Spare Change News] are doing something better,” says Weems. “They make some money working on the paper and then they move to something bigger.”
Beyond advocating for the local homeless population, Spare Change News works to fill in the gaps of Cambridge’s coverage. Issues that deal with homelessness, as Weems puts it, are often overlooked in places like the Globe or the Boston Herald.
“You know, it’s not their focus, whereas it is somewhat of a focus for us,” says Weems. “Homeless people are human. They go through the same trials and tribulations everybody else does.”
In an emailed statement, Carla Kath, the director of communication at the Globe, wrote that the paper is “dedicated to in-depth coverage of all major issues confronting Cambridge and Greater Boston, including poverty and homelessness” and cited the Globe’s contributions to local nonprofits that support unhoused people.
Spare Change News’ connection to the homeless community can also give them unique insights into mainstream stories.
On Aug. 16, 2005, the Boston Herald published an article linking the death of Steven Neiber, a 40-year-old homeless man, to “The Stomper,” another homeless man previously convicted of manslaughter and recently released from prison. The next day, the Herald published a follow-up article identifying “The Stomper” as Dennis Connolly and publishing his mugshot.
Two days later, Spare Change News published a special edition of their paper with the headline: “Herald Spreads False Panic Among Homeless People.” The article accuses the Herald of using “circumstantial evidence” to wrongly tie Connolly to the death. Witnesses interviewed by Spare Change News — “people on the street,” as Weems calls them — instead linked the death to a different man, whom they saw Neiber get into a fight with earlier that night.
No charges in the case were ever made public. In an emailed statement, Kevin Corrado, the publisher of the Herald, wrote, “Under new ownership, the Herald has become a daily must-read. Our journalism is unparalleled, and we remain the watchdogs that readers count on us to be.”
Weems recalls seeing people on the T reading Spare Change News’ story. “I was so excited, I was crying,” he says.
Weems’ story echoes Levy’s experiences with readers of the Cambridge Day. “It can matter a lot to people when their thing is paid attention to and respected and communicated to the rest of the community,” Levy says. “The bigger the news venue, the less like it’s going to be in there.”
Spare Change News is not immune to the challenges facing local outlets in Cambridge: According to Weems, the outlet switched from a bi-weekly to monthly paper after the pandemic, and its number of vendors and staff have decreased significantly in recent years. But even now, the Herald incident stands out to Weems.
“It’s not every day you can beat somebody else who happens to be the big guy on the block,” he says, beaming. “So we’ve had our moments.”
‘Make art. Be heard’
{shortcode-be29865d8a9c7908fa05930b7f2d42574eaa573c}n their bid to sustain the Cambridge Day, Marc Levy and Cambridge News Inc. fight to preserve a traditional model of local media. In the heart of Central Square, however, Cambridge Community Television offers an alternative.
On a Monday afternoon, the place is buzzing with energy. High school students from Cambridge Rindge and Latin chatter excitedly as they make their way through the building's winding hall — past the lobby where they say hello to the people at the desk, past the studios where community members are filming, editing, and streaming their various shows — to their weekly camera workshop with the Youth Media Program. Yanka Petri, CCTV’s Youth and Administrative Manager, stands in front of the students at a table, greeting everyone by name as they prepare to screen their projects from the semester.
CCTV is a public access television station, offering pay-what-you-can memberships to use their space and equipment. Any member can sign up to livestream a show from one of the studios or send in videos they create from home to be broadcasted on one of CCTV’s three cable channels. In return, CCTV asks for a copy of the work to keep in the studio’s archive.
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“These folks coming in and doing their own shows — that’s maybe not a way to inform or educate, but it’s a way to feel heard and feel seen,” says Josh Artman, CCTV’s Stations Operation Manager.
The station’s motto, he explains, is “Make art. Be heard.” Instead of reporting on Cambridge, the way a traditional media outlet might, the team at CCTV encourages Cambridge residents to tell their own stories.
Petri praises the station for making information visually engaging, something she feels traditional local outlets struggle to do.
“If you look at our videos, they’re very quirky,” she says. “It’s usually fun and quick information that is visually appealing. You can have a good laugh out of it, even if it’s something extremely serious. And, you know, you can’t get that through a newspaper.”
Artman added that when he looks for local reporting, he often turns to social media rather than newspapers for information. He cites recent biker deaths in Cambridge as a prime example — he saw them on X first.
“Even with all of its flaws and warts and ugly, disgusting, vile shit on it, X is still one of the more premier platforms for citizen journalism right now,” he says.
Petri’s and Artman’s critiques speak to the waning interest in — and distrust of — traditional media. As of October 2024, an annual Gallup poll found that Americans’ trust in the media was at an all-time low. Only one third of the people surveyed felt that media outlets report “fully, accurately, and fairly.”
Starting in 2007, CCTV partnered with a citizen journalism project called Neighbor Media to provide Cambridge residents with the training and equipment for their own reporting. The goal was to “report on the matters happening in their very own neighborhoods,” wrote Frank Lopez, the program’s head from 2013 to 2018, in an emailed statement. According to Lopez, NeighborMedia aimed to fill the gaps in mainstream coverage with a more interactive model.
Participants could create videos and articles focusing on hyperlocal issues that mattered to them and the community. In mini-lessons, they would pitch story ideas and talk about local issues with one another, learning how to simultaneously develop and realize their ideas.
Under Lopez’s tenure, the program doubled in size, partnering with Lesley University and its students while boosting the amount of video content it produced. Using CCTV’s channels, NeighborMedia journalists would often live stream interviews, and help Lopez host “Cambridge Uncovered” — a talk show focusing on a different issue each month. Lopez highlighted participants and their work in his weekly show “NeighborMedia Tonight.”
The program’s tagline read: “We’ve got Cambridge covered.”
Though the NeighborMedia shuttered shortly after Lopez’s departure in 2018, CCTV continues to provide similar classes and training.
“We’re working on those citizen journalist-type skills with people,” says Artman. “Even though we don’t have NeighborMedia, we’re still giving members the tools and training to be able to do those things themselves.”
Still, Artman recognizes the limitations of transmitting information through technology — whether that’s television, the internet, or social media.
“It can definitely be pretty isolating to not have either the computers or even an email address,” says Artman.
He adds that two-factor authentication exacerbates the problem of access. “If you don’t have a phone, or don’t have a consistent phone number, then you’re locked out from all these things that, under another system, would be public utilities,” he says.
CCTV tries to counter this issue with a newer program called the Digital Navigator Pilot Program, which they run in partnership with a local nonprofit. The program offers free internet access, computers, and equipment to eligible groups. Participants learn how to check their emails, pay their bills online, and develop technological literacy.
Several staff members at CCTV say their programming builds a community amongst their members. As a former Youth Media Program participant, Petri says she felt this effect firsthand.
Originally from Brazil, she moved to the United States when she was 13 and enrolled at Cambridge Rindge and Latin. In her sophomore year of high school, she found CCTV. “I just wanted to get my voice heard. And this was the perfect place for me,” says Petri.
After graduating from high school, she went on to study photography in college and worked several jobs in media before returning to CCTV to teach the Youth Media Program.
“Ultimately I landed back here. And I don’t know what that tells you about CCTV, but what that tells me is that this place feels like home to me,” Petri says. “It feels like a community that we just want to keep coming back to, and I think I’m the prime example of that.”
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{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}he Cambridge Week, the print edition of the Day, is delivered to CCTV’s studio each week.
The Feb. 27, 2025 issue contains a map of Cambridge, spread across pages six and seven. The map is dotted with red points across the city’s neighborhoods, each dot representing an event. From MIT student showcases to Mardi Gras raves to Harvard lectures about the history of milk in Mongolia, the map makes the vibrance of Cambridge clear.
Each week, Petri lays out the map on a table next to the front desk for visitors to look at as they come in and out of the space.
She wonders if, in the future, CCTV could collaborate with the Day, making short five-minute videos of what’s happening in Cambridge. She believes the videos could make the Week’s map section more accessible. “Not everybody can read a newspaper, but people can listen to information,” she says.
Levy also believes that media outlets benefit from each other’s existence — when one folds, the others feel it. He calls this the ecology of news, the way local papers enhance the coverage of larger ones.
“You need that ecology,” he says. “You can’t just chop out all the stuff at the bottom and expect the things at the top to still have what you want to see.”
—Magazine writer Alexander W. Anoma can be reached at alexander.anoma@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @AnomaAlexander.
—Magazine writer Aurora J. B. Sousanis can be reached at aurora.sousanis@thecrimson.com
