Navigating Massachusetts news deserts

July 20, 2026

By CommonWealth Beacon Staff

Let’s start with a statistic — one many people might find sobering. Between 2013 and 2023, Massachusetts lost 60 percent of its reporters. To put that number into context, across the US during the same time period, roughly two-thirds of the states fared better. In New England, only Connecticut was worse.

Depending on where you live in the Bay State, you may have access to at least one public radio station or a hyperlocal digital newsroom that covers your town hall, the school board, and local businesses. People who live in and around Boston have two National Public Radio stations to choose between and the Globe, which still publishes award-winning investigations and thoughtful community news, even if staff has shrunk and the paper itself is covering fewer communities than it did in the past.

While several hyperlocal newsrooms have launched in communities like Brookline, Newton, and New Bedford in the last half decade, there is an information gap forming: Many residents across the Bay State — especially those outside of Greater Boston and in less populous, lower-income areas — live in what are known as news deserts or areas without a credible source of information about their municipal government, civic life, or even their broader community.

This week on The Codcast, editor Laura Colarusso sits down with a trio of guests to understand the landscape: Javier Marin, the executive chairman and founder of El Planeta, a leading Spanish-language news organization based in Boston; Sophie Culpepper, a staff writer at Nieman Lab, a website dedicated to helping journalism adapt to the changing economic and technological landscapes; and Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University and cohost of the What Works: The Future of Local News podcast. Together, they unpack the nuances of the information ecosystem in Massachusetts. (Marin and Kennedy are members of the CommonWealth Beacon advisory board.)

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