This page is the archive of former major projects of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
Somerville News Garden
Launched in June 2019 after a successful public forum on the crisis in journalism in Somerville the previous February, the Somerville News Garden was a grassroots effort to attempt to stop Somerville, MA, USA from turning into what media academics are calling a “news desert”—a municipality that no longer has professionally-produced news outlets. The initiative was sponsored by the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism in partnership with the Somerville Media Center and concluded operations in June 2023 after successfully spinning-off two of its four projects into a new independent organization, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the model BINJ developed for helping municipalities to revive failing local news infrastructures.
SNG had four projects:
The Neighborhood Media School that trained Somerville-area residents in the fundamentals of reporting, news analysis, and multimedia production (e.g., photography, video, data visualization) was suspended after a trial run in summer 2020 due to logistical difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic and was never restarted.
In January 2022, SNG spun off the Somerville Media Fund—an independent IRS 501(c)(3) foundation that helps provide professionally produced journalism covering important issues of the day in Somerville, Massachusetts in the public interest and also seeks to educate Somerville residents about the importance of journalism and media literacy to our democracy on an ongoing basis. SMF continues to run and now publishes the SOME Publication, a citywide arts monthly).
In February 2023, SNG spun off the Somerville Wire, a news service run by professional journalists with contributions from area residents that covers Somerville and syndicates its articles to interested independent news outlets and the public at large, as a project of the Somerville Media Fund. Somerville Wire shut down in February 2024 due to lack of funds.
In June 2023, BINJ shut down its Research Group that had conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups with Somervillians to learn about their news habits and preferences. That same month the Journal of Alternative & Community Media published an article jointly authored by Prof. Gino Canella of Emerson College and BINJ Executive Director Jason Pramas based on the group’s findings entitled “Creating a News Garden: Maintaining place and the role of local journalism” (clink the link to see the abstract).
Email info@binj.news for more information.
Pandemic Democracy Project
The Pandemic Democracy Project was an emergency initiative created to allow BINJ to continue its core mission—producing hard-hitting journalism while educating and engaging the public to help rebuild the local news infrastructure around Boston and Massachusetts—during the coronavirus crisis. It concluded operations in 2021.
The original background text for the PDP follows:
One of the signal features of our current situation is that the rolling collapse of local commercial news media is now accelerating as the businesses it relies on for advertising has largely shut down in the face of social distancing and stay at home policies in response to the pandemic.
As such, we have been recruiting professional and amateur journalists to provide breaking coverage of key societal institutions—government, corporate, social, and cultural—in communities in and around Boston. We have also been recruiting student journalists who have all had to leave their colleges and return home—leaving them with little to do and few prospects for internships through at least spring and summer 2020.
We devoted $10,000 to this new initiative at its launch in March 2020. We have been paying $100 (and up) per article participating journalists have produced since that time. And we have now made PDP a part of our annual budget until the pandemic is over. We are raising more money as we go along to continue covering subjects of local interest as they relate to the coronavirus crisis. In this fashion, we are doing our small part to support some of the many Mass journalists who were already struggling before the crisis, but have now abruptly found themselves out of work.
We are featuring all articles produced by our journalists here on the BINJ website, binjonline.org, and syndicating them for free to all public-spirited news outlets—notably DigBoston, as well as other local partners including Brain Arts, Spare Change, and El Planeta in Spanish, and also local alternative weeklies across the country.
Journalists and journalism educators who would like to work with the Pandemic Democracy Project should contact us at info@binj.news immediately.
Massachusetts community news outlets that would like to partner with us should do the same.
