In 1996, the first issue of CommonWealth magazine featured a cover story on the changing economics of middle-class life in Massachusetts. The story focused on Heritage Road in Billerica, where the residents were doing reasonably well but having some doubts about the promise of the American Dream.

Fifteen years later, CommonWealth is operating in a very different journalistic environment but still pursuing answers to many of the same questions. We are releasing two issues of the magazine simultaneously. One is focused on the American Dream, while this magazine, our 15th anniversary issue, surveys the state of journalism in Massachusetts.

It’s an interesting time to take stock of what’s happening in journalism. The business has taken a tough economic punch and is still trying to figure out how to survive in a digital age. Newsrooms are filled with far fewer reporters today than just a decade ago and there’s been an exodus of journalists from Washington, Beacon Hill, and city halls across the state.

Walter Robinson, a former Boston Globe reporter and currently a professor of journalism at Northeastern Univer­sity, says news organizations are having a hard time playing their watchdog role, leaving unchallenged much of what government officials say. “Increasingly, for the public, government is what it says it is,” he says.

But amid the gloom and doom there are glimmers of hope. The Boston Globe’s recent launch of BostonGlobe.com is a bid to see if people will pay for quality news online. A lot is riding on its success.

We’re seeing more collaboration between news organizations and more reliance on nonconventional sources of reporting. Boston University, for example, through classes that put journalism students to work for regional newspapers, now boasts that it has more reporters covering the State House than any news organization.

In this issue, we take a look at some of the challenges —and opportunities—created by the seismic changes in the journalism world. Tom Fiedler, dean of the Boston Univ­ersity College of Communication, tries in our cover story to answer a nagging question: What happens when a community loses its daily newspaper, as Holyoke did nearly 20 years ago?

Gabrielle Gurley looks at the rise of nonprofit journalism and what it means for the industry. In his Perspective, Eric Newton of the Knight Foundation recounts a number of nonprofit successes and sounds an optimistic tone. “With our new tools today, an individual journalist can do more now than ever,” he says. “Our profession is limited only by our own imagination—and our courage.”

CommonWealth is a bit of an anomaly in this discussion. As founder Tripp Jones recounts in our Conver­sa­tion, CommonWealth was established as a journalistic arm of MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank. It was supposed to shine a spotlight on public policy issues that were getting short shrift in the mainstream press. But as the mainstream press has retrenched, CommonWealth has become more of a traditional news organization.

I’d like to thank the sponsors of this magazine and the Serious Fun event for making CommonWealth’s journalism possible. Serious Fun is meant to be fun and light-hearted, but its purpose is to generate money for serious journalism and to award scholarships to the young people who may become the news gurus of the future. Thanks to all our supporters.

Family photos are a great way to mark the passage of time. Take a look at the cover of CommonWealth’s first magazine 15 years ago. It features the Timmins family of Billerica. They lived on a typical street in a typical town. The Dennis the Menace lookalike on the cover was 6-year-old Ben Timmins. The Timmins family later moved to Pennsylvania, but Ben returned to Boston to study journalism at Boston University. Fittingly, he interned during the summer of 2010 at CommonWealth, where we were lucky enough to snap a picture of his family. Ben now works at Automobile Magazine in Detroit. Photo courtesy of Ben Timmins.