After over a year on a very busy hiatus
From September 2015 to March 2023, I wrote this Apparent Horizon column for the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and syndicated it to community and alternative news publications statewide (and sometimes nationally). In the beginning, my goal was simply to do my part to make sure BINJ produced as much regular content as possible.
So, I began to publish every week. Taking breaks maybe one or two weeks a year. I wrote commentary on a broad array of topics from science to history to culture. But generally Apparent Horizon was a column covering Massachusetts politics from my perspective—which is best described as left libertarian (that is, yay for both political and economic democracy). I eventually produced about 300 dispatches, though the true number may never be known because most AH installments were scattered in the winds of syndication … and I didn’t keep a tally. Which is why one project I’d like to find time to undertake will be to gather them all on the BINJ website in their own section.
I won a couple of national journalism awards for my labors and I hope that I helped the world be a tiny bit better than it would have been if I had never published a single missive.
Over the years and through many travails, I kept on pumping out new work. But the crises BINJ faced during the COVID pandemic slowed down my output significantly by 2022.
And in the lead up to starting a new BINJ news outlet, I finally put Apparent Horizon aside entirely in March 2023–figuring if our initiative to branch out from just syndicating content to fielding a publication worked out, then I’d get back to writing my column at some point.
Finally, in August 2023, after many months of work by my BINJ colleagues and I with the help of over a dozen young journalists in our spring and summer intern cohorts last year, we launched HorizonMass. Which we have been publishing every couple of weeks since.
And now, almost one year later, I feel ready to start writing Apparent Horizon again. In the public interest, as ever.
Now let’s have some fun …
Apparent Horizon—an award-winning political column—is syndicated by the MassWire news service of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Jason Pramas is editor-in-chief of HorizonMass and executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
