MENUMENU
  • About Us
        • Mission
        • Financials
        • Contact Us
        • Team Bios
        • Reporters
        • Press Room
  • Reports
        • Features
        • News Map
        • Arts
        • Columns
        • Working Projects
        • Pitch a Project
  • Events
        • Upcoming EventsUpcoming BINJ Events
        • Past EventsPast BINJ Events
  • BINJ Network
        • Reporting Partnerships
        • Work with BINJ
  • Services
        • Journalism Consulting
          • BINJ in a Box
          • Speaking
  • Community Impact
        • Journalism Education
          • Community Journalism 101 Workshops
          • Investigative Reporting Workshop
          • Journalism Research Methods Workshop
          • Neighborhood Media School
        • Community Interaction
          • Pop-Up Newsrooms
          • Community Summits
  • Signup for BINJ newsletter
  • Somerville Wire

BINJ

Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism

February 23, 2021 By JASON PRAMAS

WHAT IS THE SOMERVILLE WIRE?

Somerville Wire logo

(Somerville Wire) – Aside from the brief introduction at the top of our somervillewire.news web page, we haven’t really explained what the Somerville Wire is and why we’ve just launched it. So I thought it was worth giving readers a more in-depth explanation.

The Wire is an initiative of the Somerville News Garden project—which has been organized together with a dozen active volunteers in partnership with our 501(c)3 charity, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

The mission of the project is to work with volunteers from around Somerville to help rebuild the city’s news infrastructure—which has gradually fallen into hard times since the 1990s. Due to a combination of the rise of the Internet and the consolidation of the American news industry by a handful of multinational corporations. Which created a crisis now besetting thousands of cities and towns nationwide: a growing information vacuum at the municipal level.

So the purpose of the Somerville Wire is to produce news articles like a local version of the Associated Press and make them available for republication by any independent news organization in the city for free. News organizations owned by major corporations can also reprint our work, but will have to pay market rates to do so. And, of course, the reading public can always read our stories at somervillewire.news.

BINJ staff and Somerville News Garden volunteers have not undertaken this effort to compete with existing or future news outlets in Somerville. We are simply working on creating a replicable model that cities and towns around Massachusetts and the US can use to stop their municipalities from turning into “news deserts,” in the parlance of journalism academics. After working with Somerville residents for two years to figure out the best ways to do that, we decided it was important to both train working people from all walks of life in basic journalism skills through our Neighborhood Media School and to give those people somewhere to publish news articles about their own neighborhoods. Which led us to create the Wire.

This news service, then, will feature articles by both professional journalists that are recruited by BINJ and community journalists that we help train at the Neighborhood Media School—which we are running in partnership with the Somerville Media Center. We will also train Somerville High School students with SMC who will also be invited to publish their journalism in the Wire. And we will constantly invite community members to publish opinion articles and event announcements with us. Additionally, we are looking into translating our articles into commonly-spoken languages in Somerville other than English. In this way, we strive to help one small American city to start to “talk to itself” better than it has since the 1990s. Which we think is a prerequisite for keeping our democracy functioning reasonably smoothly at the local level in these difficult times.

BINJ and our Somerville volunteers (we call them “gardeners,” since we’re trying to turn a news desert into an information “garden”) will endeavor to track the relative success or failure of our efforts with a series of short reports. It is these documents that we think will help other municipalities to follow in our footsteps, while allowing us to improve our work based on facts on the ground.

There’s much more to say about the Somerville Wire, but that’s the basic rundown of the initiative. Anyone who would like to get involved or just have a conversation about our plans, should feel free to contact us at somervillewire@binjonline.org. 


Subscribe to the Somerville Wire Weekly Newsletter here: http://eepurl.com/hpBYPv/.


Jason Pramas is executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.

JASON PRAMAS

Jason is executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and writes the columns Apparent Horizon and Townie. He is also executive editor and associate publisher of DigBoston. Before that, he founded the nonprofit Open Media Boston and other grassroots publications. Jason is a longtime labor-community organizer with an MFA in visual arts and is the institutional memory of our gang. His column Apparent Horizon is a 2018 and 2019 winner of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia Political Column Award.

  • JASON PRAMAS
    https://binjonline.com/author/jason-pramas/
    Laura Kiesel and Jordan Frias testify at the second journalism commission hearing, July 10, 2019. Photo courtesy of Sarah Betancourt.
    February 7, 2021
    GRASSROOTS ORGANIZING KEY TO PASSING JOURNALISM COMMISSION LAW
  • JASON PRAMAS
    https://binjonline.com/author/jason-pramas/
    Washington Street, Newspaper Row (in Boston a century ago)
    July 26, 2020
    HELP SAVE LOCAL NEWS! ASK YOUR MA STATE REP TO BACK AMENDMENT #40 TODAY!
  • JASON PRAMAS
    https://binjonline.com/author/jason-pramas/
    BINJ & Dig anniversary image
    June 12, 2020
    FIVE OF BINJ, THREE YEARS OF DIGBOSTON

Filed Under: Editorial, Somerville News Garden, Somerville Wire Tagged With: BINJ, Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, explainer, Jason Pramas, journalism, Massachusetts, media, news, Somerville

Explore BINJ
Topics
Education
Criminal Justice
Engagement
Housing
Environment
Immigration
Opioids
Throwback
Transportation
Columns
Apparent Horizon
Terms of Service
Townie
Crowdfunded Projects
CROWDFUND: FILMING INTERVENING GETTING HIGH TEAM (F.I.G.H.T.)
CROWDFUND: HISTORY REPORTING
CROWDFUND: HOUSING & AFFORDABILITY
CROWDFUND: MANCHESTER DIVIDED
CROWDFUND: MUSIC & ARTS
CROWDFUND: POLICE, PRISONS & PAROLE
CROWDFUND: SOMERVILLE NEWS GARDEN
CROWDFUND: TRANSPORTATION
Events
Upcoming Events
Past Events
Somerville Wire
Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Search in posts
Search in pages
BINJ publishes through multiple local and national partners including ...

Alternet
How Massachusetts Became Ground-Zero for Corporate Education Privatization
Boston Metro
Mass. considers new road fees, commissions yet another traffic study
Bay State Banner
In 1850s Boston, slave case sparked conflict
DigBoston
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guns In Mass (But Were Afraid To Ask
El Planeta
Datos Reveladores Sobre El Uso De Pistolas Paralizantes Por Policías De Ma
KillerBoomBox
Around My Way: Jefe Replay is a Rox Star
Muckrock
A Close Look at Tasers in Massachusetts
The Shoestring
Hampshire County has the most violent small jail in the state, and one of the least transparent
Valley Advocate
Paramilitary Policing Infiltrates Western Mass
Watertown Tab
Who knew Boston cops were injured in the Watertown shootout? Who didn’t?
Worcester Magazine
Children and Swat Raids: An Unintended Consequence

Copyright © 2021 · Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism | Massachusetts Media Fund · Log in