June 21, 2021 — When Jon Mitchell, the mayor of New Bedford, Mass., delivered his state of the city address in 2019, he made an unusual plea.
“Support your local paper,” he said, referring to The Standard-Times, New Bedford’s daily newspaper. “Your city needs it to function effectively.”
Owned by Gannett, the parent company of USA Today and more than 250 other dailies, The Standard-Times was getting thin. Like thousands of newspapers across the country, it was taking on the characteristics of a “ghost” paper — a diminished publication that had lost much of its staff, curtailing its reach and its journalistic ambitions.
Now, two years later, the mayor’s assessment is more blunt.
“We don’t have a functioning newspaper anymore, and I say that with empathy with the folks who work there,” he said in an interview. “It used to be that I couldn’t sneeze without having to explain myself. Now, I have to beg people to show up at my press conferences. Please, ask me questions!”
He was so eager for the city to have a robust paper that he joined a group that explored buying The Standard-Times — but Gannett wasn’t selling.
So when a cadre of journalists, including former editors of The Standard-Times, said last year that they planned to start a nonprofit digital news outlet to cover New Bedford, the mayor was all in.
As unusual as it may seem, Mr. Mitchell wanted his administration to be held accountable. Beyond that, he said that a trusted news source could restore something vital that he felt New Bedford had lost: “a sense of place,” by which he meant an ongoing narrative of daily life in this multicultural blue-collar city of 95,000 residents.
In the 19th century, when Melville embarked from its shores on the whaling voyage that would inspire “Moby-Dick,” it was the richest city per capita in North America. Now, 23 percent of New Bedford’s citizens live in poverty.
The mayor’s vision of a trusted news source was similar to what the group of journalists had in mind when they created The New Bedford Light. With its newsroom still under construction, in a refurbished textile mill, the publication went online June 7.