IN THE SPRING of 1996, a new magazine began making its way onto the desks of policymakers and into the mailboxes of readers across the Bay State. Its inaugural issue featured a smiling family of four sitting on their sofa in the living room of their home in Billerica – an example of “Making it in the Middle Class.”

In this special edition of The Codcast, CommonWealth Beacon editor Laura Colarusso sits down with Dave Denison, founding editor of CommonWealth magazine – CWB’s precursor – to discuss the seismic changes in both the media and political environment in Massachusetts on the 30th anniversary of the magazine’s launch.

In CommonWealth’s early days, Denison had to prove that a policy-focused magazine could produce exciting articles, and not, as others tried to label it, “eat your peas” journalism.

The secret? According to Denison, it was finding great writers.

“It turned out that if you do the stories well enough with writers who know what they’re doing, that you can overcome that,” Denison said. “That’s the whole challenge, is to write a magazine piece that has such a good opening that people start it and keep going.”

It started, for Denison, with old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting. On a mission to capture the essence of middle-class life, Denison zeroed in on middle-income Billerica, and in particular, a street called Heritage Road.

“I thought, well, that’s something you can work with, because we’re talking about the heritage of the American dream,” he said.

Without the aid of social media to track people down, Denison canvassed the neighborhood on foot. From the beginning, CommonWealth’s mission was always to put in the effort.

“Most newspaper journalists go out, and the whole point is, let’s spend 15, 20 minutes with someone so we get some quotes, then we can put the quotes in the story,” Denison said. “That’s not deep enough. I tried to go a little bit deeper on that.”

While CommonWealth’s mission to go in-depth where others do not remains unchanged, over the last three decades a shift in the media environment surrounding the publication required some adjustments. CommonWealth magazine printed its last physical edition in 2018 and has since transformed into the website known as CommonWealth Beacon today.

“I’ve been working for the last 10 years at a magazine that still prints, the Baffler magazine, but it never ceases to stun me how, even though we print it and mail it and put a lot of effort into the aesthetics of the magazine, it seems like so much of the readership comes to us online,” Denison said. “That’s where people are now.”