“We’ve always styled ourselves as the voice of the region,” says Rick Holmes, the opinion editor for The MetroWest Daily News. “Heck, we invented the term MetroWest.” Indeed, the newspaper can proudly take credit for the term now used to describe the expanse of cities and towns west of Boston, having sponsored a contest in the early 1980s to give the growing swath of suburbia a name.
and opinion editor Rick Holmes.
Getting people to accept a regional label, however, may be easier than convincing them to embrace common regional goals. But that’s exactly what the Daily News is out to do. In perhaps its boldest move since christening the area with a new name more than two decades ago, the newspaper has embarked on an agenda-setting campaign to convince a sprawling collection of suburban cities and towns that there is a broad range of issues that unites them.
Through a six-part, six-month series running from January to June dubbed “MetroWest Agenda,” the paper tried to cast some of the region’s broadest concerns under a spotlight, and lay out steps to seize some control over them. The series ran entirely in the opinion section, but was paired with related news stories on the front page.
MetroWest Agenda attempted to explore the roots of some of the region’s biggest problems. It tackled the lack of regional public transportation and the heavy burden Turnpike tolls place on MetroWest commuters, a pair of issues at the head of any list of the region’s concerns. Also highlighted were rising health care costs, the region’s growing lack of affordable housing—both for middle-class and working-class families—immigration laws, which have a strong impact on both Framingham’s immigrant-rich population and the MetroWest workforce, and proposals to reshape Massachusetts’s high schools.
Holmes confesses that a motivating factor behind the series was his impatience with MetroWest’s delegation in the Legislature. Its members work hard, he says, but “they tend to get outflanked by the folks from Boston.” The 54-year-old news veteran has never been one to pull punches in his regularly commentaries, which still manage to maintain a civil tone. “We get do get angry on some fronts,” he says, warming to a favorite topic. “I’ve been working for this newspaper for 20 years, and for 20 years we have seen the interests of Mass Turnpike tollpayers ignored because the political power resides in Boston. We’ve been screwed left and right.”
While Holmes hasn’t been shy about expressing such sentiments on the paper’s editorial page, MetroWest Agenda represented an effort to channel that editorial indignation into more probing examinations of important challenges facing the region—and possible paths to solutions. “We cover 30 communities and sometimes more, and we always try to find themes of common interest,” says Holmes. “If we don’t express the regional agenda, who will?”
A STAKE IN THE GROUND
The 108-year-old, 30,000-plus circulation paper has changed its name four times in an effort to define itself and its readership area. It’s been bought and sold three times in the last 25 years, most recently in the deal that turned the paper and its Community Newspaper Co. compatriots, which had been owned by Fidelity Investments, over to Pat Purcell’s Herald Media.
The Daily News has never won the Pulitzers of the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, and it hasn’t had to wrestle with the same hard urban questions facing the Lowell Sun or The Daily Item in Lynn [Editor’s note: This sentence has been corrected]. What The MetroWest Daily News is probably best known for, in fact, is holding a contest that resulted in its naming the region it covers “MetroWest,” in 1983, and then, 15 years later, following suit by changing its own name from the Middlesex News to match the new moniker.
Lots of other things have changed in MetroWest over the past two decades. Although it’s subject to different definitions, at its largest, incorporating more than 30 cities and towns, MetroWest is now the second-largest employment region in the state. The region is home to several of the state’s biggest employers, including TJX, Bose, EMC, and Staples, as well as the Natick Mall and Shoppers’ World. The MetroWest Chamber of Commerce (one of many retitled results of the paper’s name game) pegs the area’s total personal income at $13.5 billion—resulting in a sizeable contribution to the state’s tax coffers.
With a population of more than 600,000 residents—many of them independent voters unaffiliated with either major political party—it has also become a pivotal battleground where races for statewide office are often won or lost. But despite its economic might and electoral punch, the region has never seemed to develop a centralized focus to leverage its considerable assets. Without a sense of itself, say MetroWest leaders, the region’s residents have continued to watch tax revenues feed Boston projects, while they sit in traffic.
“I think that everyone would acknowledge that MetroWest hasn’t been exerting its clout,” says Ted Welte, president of the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce. “Much of what happens in the Commonwealth, and in the State House, is Boston-focused. The MBTA is a Boston-centric delivery system for getting people to work. The Big Dig drove transportation funds to Boston. The reality is, many of the good jobs are out here, and we’re having a tough time getting a reverse commute to allow different people to come out here and work. Those are the kinds of things that on an ongoing basis we need to work on.”
Putting the region to work on those kinds of big issues was exactly the idea behind MetroWest Agenda. The series was the brainchild of a somewhat unlikely pairing: Holmes, a 20-year veteran at the newspaper, and Paul Andrew, a 30-year-old, Scotland-born political consultant and occasional local columnist who contacted him with the idea of writing broad public policy pieces. Many of the issues the series addressed are regularly covered by the paper, but mainly in the context of daily news developments. There was a need to “move beyond sound bites,” says Andrew, who worked for Tony Blair, among others, before settling in Boston with Hattaway Communications, run by former Al Gore spokesman Doug Hattaway.
Rather than simply send out a team of reporters to gather stories on these topics, the series combined analytical lead stories with editorials and illustrations by cartoonist Dave Granlund. It added to that op-eds solicited from multiple sides of each issue (they had a local representative of the border-patrolling Minutemen as well as the head of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition address immigration policy, for example). And rather than simply taking pokes with his editorial prod, Holmes punctuated his pieces with a “to-do list for leaders”—civic homework assignments mostly for public officials, but occasionally also for residents, like calls for civility in discussions of immigration and an end to reflexive NIMBYism in the face of proposals for new housing.
For Holmes, the series worked as what he called a “stake in the ground” for the newspaper and for the region.
“Every couple of years we sit down and do editorial boards with candidates for the state Legislature and other offices, and we tend to have pretty cordial conversations,” Holmes says. “People tend to say the right things. But then we find ourselves two years later having the same conversations with the same people, and thinking, ‘I hear what you’re saying about health care, I hear what you’re saying about school financing. But what have you done?’”
MEASURES OF SUCCESS?
While the reaction to the series among the general populace has been slow—and with a sprawling circulation that reaches only about five percent of the regional population, that might be expected—the paper’s willingness to grapple with sweeping topics that often defy quick fixes has been largely applauded by the region’s leaders.
“They could continue to pound out the daily stories and the sports and the business wire and probably be successful,” says John Palanowicz, the CEO of Marlborough Hospital. “But I give them credit for the fact that they took the bull by the horns, and pulled together individuals from the community…and threw out these issues for public consumption.”
The MetroWest Agenda series was met by MetroWest politicians with a mixture of eagerness and apprehension. Many of them participated in the stories and helped frame the issues for the paper during a series of discussions that took place on each topic. In many cases—such as the need for MetroWest to be able to develop its own regional transportation authority, an idea that has gained momentum on Beacon Hill—the suggestions involved initiatives on which local officials were already working.
“I thought it was a very good idea to take these issues and go more in-depth,” says state Sen. Pam Resor, an Acton Democrat, who heads the MetroWest Caucus in the Senate. “We’re always struggling with new ways to get those ideas out to people.”
“It was superb and very helpful, particularly the transportation series,” says Rep. David Linsky, Democrat of Natick, who heads the MetroWest Caucus on the House side. “It gave me more of a regional MetroWest perspective rather than just looking at transportation as it affects my three towns.”
But those same legislators weren’t quite as thrilled with the idea that the series could be used as a yardstick to gauge their performance down the road.
“In terms of setting up some kind of measurement that the populace is supposed to use for its officials, it’s kind of a stretch,” says Resor. “There are so many things we’re working on at one time other than the ones that they covered. And I think most citizens recognize there’s a broader range of issues that we’re dealing with.”
If elected officials are less than enthused about turning the spotlight on their own effectiveness, so be it, says Holmes. “We needed to do a better job of holding people accountable” and “turning vague goals into concrete achievements,” he says.
Though reviews were largely favorable, the series did not come in for universal praise. One critique, offered by Kris Allen, a former co-chair of the 495/MetroWest Partnership (which works to promote economic vitality and preserve natural resources in the fast-growing area), is that some of the issues Holmes and Andrew chose to look at were either applicable only to certain parts of MetroWest, such as immigration, or were more global in scope, such as education reform [Editor’s note: Allen’s identification has been corrected]. Meanwhile, she says, other topics more unique to the region as a whole were ignored.
“They tried to define the region on its issues, but they might have missed with some,” says Allen, citing open space and water resources and usage as two examples.
Tying everything together on a regional basis can be difficult, agrees Richard Lodge, the editor of the Daily News. But he says trying to do so is worth the effort.
“The issues in Dedham aren’t the issues in Hudson,” says Lodge. “But the issue of affordable housing is an issue in many communities, and so is illegal immigration and its impact on economy, on policing, and on equal treatment. There are some common issues that I do think affect people in all of eastern Massachusetts and what they have to deal with.”
Allen’s critique also points to a larger problem with addressing regional concerns in MetroWest—that it’s often hard to figure out just where the region begins and ends. Split, rather than bounded, by I-495 and routes 128 and 9, the vaguely defined area spreads over three different counties, is fed by different watersheds, and is part of multiple congressional districts. That’s been a problem for the newspaper in the past, as well, as it has tried to make incursions into towns as close to Boston as Wellesley and as far out as Bellingham. But Holmes says an even bigger problem for local papers can be the continuous thrum of disparate issues, lacking a larger context.
“It’s ‘this day I’m writing about Framingham’s selectmen, and the next I’m writing about the death of the King of Saudi Arabia,’” he says of his dilemma as an editorialist. “That’s great, that’s what you want. But what you worry about is having this broad range without enough depth.”
For that problem MetroWest Agenda was the antidote. “By forcing ourselves to pick six topics that are going to be more important than those others, then you really become an expert,” he says. “I’ve gone deeper. I’ve increased my understanding.”
And for critics who say those six topics missed some big issues Holmes has an answer: The 2006 version of MetroWest Agenda. The kickoff will be a reprint of the full 2005 Agenda in October as a newspaper insert, which will also be sent to community leaders. After that will come a process of solicitation, with readers encouraged to send reaction by e-mail. The idea, says Holmes, is to get more “front-end input” for the next round of topics, with publication of the first new Agenda package in January.
Though not straying from the main goals of sharpening understanding of regional issues and strengthening the hand of the area’s legislative delegation, MetroWest Agenda 2006 will also be published in an election year, a fact that has not escaped Holmes’s notice.
“A lot of political clout lies between [routes] 128 and 495,” says Holmes. “I’m not sure what we’re getting for our political clout.”