In an era of digital everything, you helped launch a new print newspaper in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Fifty weeks a year, we send a print newspaper to every household in town for free. We recently published the 100th issue of the Belmont Voice. We’re a nonprofit; our mission is to inform and connect the community with local news journalism.
Rather than doing a subscription model where only those who pay get access, we chose something like the NPR model. It’s free to all. For those who want to support the paper’s ongoing work—because it costs money—donations support the journalism.
How did the idea for a local paper come about?
Like a lot of towns around the country, going through COVID made people in Belmont realize that there was an information void. Belmont is a close-in suburb of Boston with 28,000 residents. Many people come for the good school system. There were so many questions about the schools and reopening; parents were very concerned that they just weren’t getting the right information.
It’s no longer easy for local businesses to advertise directly in their community. So the fact that we send a print newspaper to every house is really interesting to them.
Social media didn’t allow for good discussions and probably just served to inflate the amount of misinformation out there. So some folks in town got together to talk about the problem. Nearby towns had launched nonprofit community newspapers, and the group had decided it was the right model before I got involved.
There used to be papers in even very small towns. What happened?
Since 2005, nearly 3,500 local newspapers in the U.S. have folded. That’s more than 3 a week for 20 years. Over 200 counties have no local news source at all.
At one time Belmont had two local newspapers, the Belmont Citizen and the Belmont Herald. By the time I moved to town in 1995, they had merged into the Belmont Citizen Herald. It was a traditional local paper; it covered town government, elections, schools, sports, and other community news. People relied on it to keep up with what was going on in town.
It’s still published, but it became a “ghost paper” a while ago. That is, it was bought up and consolidated with other area papers. They all publish syndicated content and some regional coverage but don’t try to provide news about what’s happening in the specific towns they ostensibly serve.
This trend started because, first with Craigslist and then social media, the revenue from local classified and real estate ads that newspapers depended on dried up. As the internet started to take off, a lot of papers thought, “This is so great, we’ll save money not having to pay printing costs anymore.” But nobody wanted to pay for content online.
The big companies that bought up struggling community papers cut back on journalism to save money. For the buyers, like Gannett, it seems like the bet was that targeted digital marketing would save the papers, but it’s a very hard area to make money on. Google and Facebook have made targeted digital ads very cheap. And without enough journalists to write relevant stories, the product is bad.
Ironically, it’s no longer easy for local businesses to advertise directly in their community. So the fact that we send a print newspaper to every house is really interesting to them.
By going with a nonprofit business model, our aim was to have donations cover the editorial costs while advertising would cover our fixed costs—design, printing, and mailing.
How did you come to that model?
A couple towns over, the Concord Bridge started publishing in 2023. They were very generous walking us through their numbers. And we reverse-engineered the rest.
Concord’s paper was 16 pages. The ads are various sizes—full page, quarter, eighth, etc.—but they account for five to six pages of the paper each week. That brings in roughly $1,000 a page. Since Concord has a larger commercial center and more tourism, we decided to start with a 12-page paper with four to five pages of ads in each paper.
That brings in $4,000 to $5,000 a week, 50 weeks a year; that’s around $200,000 to $250,000 revenue from advertising. We also get some income from public notices and paid obituaries.
We found affordable design and printing. And as a nonprofit we can access a reduced bulk mail rate. Since we batch papers in a way that’s easy to put in the hands of carriers, we pay 11 cents a paper. When we started, it was 9 cents; percentage-wise, that was a big increase, but it’s still so much better than we would pay if we were mailing at a for-profit rate. Those initial estimates of production costs and revenue have worked pretty well.
Are donations covering the editorial costs?
Our initial target was about $250,000 for editorial costs—the salaries and benefits of an editor-in-chief,an assistant editor, and a part-time reporter, plus some money for freelancers. The thinking was, if we can get 2,000 homes out of the 10,000 homes in Belmont to pay us $10 a month, we will take in $240,000. We also get some matching funds from the Institute for Nonprofit News, which supports member community news organizations.
We’ve made that target thus far, and we’ve been careful not to overspend. We didn’t want people to donate money only to find we couldn’t sustain the paper over time. But we do want to professionalize the organization. Adding a reporter is the highest priority. To do that we need to grow our editorial budget to closer to $300,000. At some point we may want to hire someone as publisher rather than having that as a volunteer role, but we’re taking it step by step.
The Belmont Voice is available online, too. Did you consider being only digital?
We’re getting a big benefit from print; our mind share across Belmont wouldn’t be where it is without our paper showing up in the mailbox every week. Like Concord, Belmont is small enough and affluent enough that it makes sense to get a print paper into people’s mailboxes.
But it’s not the only way to go. New Bedford is a small city—about 100,000 people—in southeastern Massachusetts with a younger, more diverse population. Historically, it was among the wealthiest communities in the country, first from whaling and then textiles. But times have changed and New Bedford’s economy has struggled. It’s still a significant fishing port today, but the median income is about half of the state’s median.
Several benefactors helped launch the New Bedford Light in 2021. They hired very experienced journalists and have been producing a really solid, digital newspaper that has won awards and supports itself through donations and grants.
It’s exciting to see a movement of nonprofit community newspapers starting. And it’s important for each town to find the approach that fits their needs. New Bedford is a bigger community; it didn’t make sense to pay the printing and distribution costs to try to get a print paper to everyone for free.
What’s in the Belmont Voice week to week?
The really important stuff is local government and schools. But feature stories are both fun and important. A clothing designer who has a little shop in Belmont had a dress worn at the Oscars. The chocolate shop in the center had its 30th anniversary. There’s a new pharmacy. One pizza shop closed and another opened. It’s small stuff, but it’s interesting to people and those articles connect the town. When you go around the center now, you see Belmont Voice clippings hanging in the window or on the wall.
We also have Belmont-themed crosswords. Someone local who has done professional crosswords for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times offered to do them periodically. They’re great. They probably have a [New York Times] Tuesday or Wednesday type of difficulty as long as you are from Belmont.
What has the reaction to the paper been?
The feedback has been awesome. Donations are our biggest affirmation that people really value having a paper covering town, and we exceeded our stretch goal for last year.
In terms of specific stories, unlike online media, it’s harder to track what readers respond to with print. We do put out an email newsletter every Monday—here’s what we’re working on this week and what you may have missed in last Friday’s paper. The open rate is in the 65% to 70% range.
We also did a survey, which both confirmed that people really like the paper and underscored what we were thinking: everyone wants more enterprise reporting and deeper dives.
Tell me a bit about the editorial team.
Everything I’ve talked about in terms of the financials is meaningless unless we put out high quality news that people like and then pay for with their donations.
Our first hire was an editor in chief, Jesse Floyd. He’s a very experienced career community journalist. He was a great choice. There were months of buildup to publishing the first issue. It was really exciting, but when it was out the door, I remember having a moment of panic—“we have to have another paper next week!” Jesse said, “Don’t worry. We’ve got this.” He has been so effective in managing the weekly flow.
Mary Byrne, who came from the Greenfield Recorder, is the assistant editor. She writes about five stories a week including a lot of coverage of town government. It’s hard work.
We also have some solid freelancers and columnists and two student journalists through an internship program at Boston University. We’ve worked with high school students to cover sports and to produce columns written from a teen point of view. We’re getting really interesting perspectives from them.
And as I said, we’re working to hire another full-time journalist. That’s going to help us get deeper stories and really enhance the quality of the paper.
Is the rest of the work keeping the organization running done by volunteers?
Our only other paid person is a halftime ad sales manager, Martha Gallagher, who is giving us a home-team discount because she was ready to slow down from her career as a marketing professional.
We’ve got strong administrative and governance support because really capable people are donating their time. Sarah Caputo is chair of the board. She is a career development professional and has been key to our ability to fundraise effectively. We raised $500,000 to launch the paper, and bring in over $300,000 each year.
I’m the president of the board. I’ve focused more operationally. Rounding out the board we have a couple of career journalists and others who are able to bring expertise to the various committees.
I should mention that Yale SOM alumni in Belmont have been very generous with financial and moral support. And I connected with [Professor] Judy Chevalier. I’ve talked with her nonprofit management class twice now. And the Nonprofit Board Fellows program has brought invaluable insight from students who each work with the board for a year—first Libby Liu ’26 and now Leah Towery ’27.
This work is your second act.
I retired from a career in investment management. My wife and I had just put three daughters through college. We were ready to see what would come next. We imagined it would involve a lot of travel, but it was the spring of 2020. My going-away party, after 20 years with the same company, was necessarily just raising a glass over Zoom.
One cold February day, a former neighbor called. She knew I had done something in business and asked if I wanted to be part of starting a newspaper in town. I’ve never been the person who seeks out new things or suddenly goes all-in on something. So I’m really glad I didn’t listen to the part of myself that said, “Who are these people?” and instead listened to the part that said, “Say yes. Then see how it goes.”
As we moved along, I realized that we were able to assemble a really good team and develop a good process. People cared. We had lots of challenges, but we were able to meet them. It’s a partnership of people who respect each other and get along.
How much time do you spend each week and what are you doing?
I probably spend about 15 to 20 hours a week doing things for the Belmont Voice. That’s mainly managing the budget and responding to issues that come up continuously with such a young business. But there’s also other things that you can’t put in a job description. Like helping copyedit the next issue, coaching the high schoolers—I wrote sports stories for my college paper—or bringing bagels to the folks at the post office to say thank you for getting the paper into every mailbox.
I also enjoy spending time talking with people that are considering launching local papers. We got invaluable help from papers in nearby towns when we were starting, so I appreciate the chance to proselytize for something that can make such a big impact in communities. There’s nothing proprietary in what we’re doing.
What has it meant to you?
For me, getting involved in my community has been very important. People are so frustrated right now. They’re ready to throw up their hands because they don’t know how to make an impact. Once I didn’t have kids in the schools or on the sports teams, I lost touch with Belmont.
This has helped me connect again. I’m down in the center a lot. I know local business owners, the folks at the post office, and people in town government. I’ve realized how much I didn’t know about how my local government works, how it’s funded, what decisions are being considered at any given moment. I’ve developed a real appreciation for the challenge of managing a small town in an expensive area.
And I’m proud of what we’ve done. Fundamentally it’s the result of good, smart people working collaboratively, many as volunteers, for the good of their community. I’m really thankful to be part of it. I wouldn’t have predicted it, but I couldn’t have come up with a better second act.
How did your experience at Yale SOM contribute to act one and act two?
The best thing about Yale SOM was meeting my wife, Jane Levin ’89. And we’ve stayed in touch with some really great friends from our time in New Haven.
From classes, I got the technical foundation for my work as an analyst and portfolio manager. I also learned the group dynamics, organizational behavior, and understanding of what makes a team work, which have been relevant both in my finance career and in launching a startup.
There were lots of times when I didn’t know exactly what to do, but between Yale SOM and my work as an analyst, I knew what questions to ask.
“The Yale School of Management is the graduate business school of Yale University, a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut.”
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