Cambridge Day to Expand Staff After Acquisition by Local Nonprofit

A local nonprofit has acquired Cambridge Day, promising to hire a number of editors and reporters to expand its operations, the news outlet announced on Tuesday in an email to financial supporters.

Cambridge News Inc., the local nonprofit group, will raise funds to hire a new publisher and editor-in-chief who will work alongside Marc Levy, who founded Cambridge Day in 2009. Levy, who has been Cambridge Day’s sole full-time writer, will remain with the publication as a senior editor and reporter.

The expanded paper’s goal will be to provide “community-focused, in-depth reporting on issues, whether it’s education or city council, government or development, housing,” said Richard A. Harriman, a board member of Cambridge News Inc.

Levy said in an interview that his original ambition in founding Cambridge Day was to “have partners and grow it organically,” but as that goal became more difficult to attain, he recognized the offer from Cambridge News Inc. offered the best path forward for the hyperlocal news outlet.

“This isn't the model that I would have thought of myself,” Levy said. “But if I want to work with people for the good of journalism in Cambridge and Somerville and the good of those communities, then I guess the challenge is for me to respond and go along to work with them.”

In the Tuesday announcement, Cambridge News Inc. cited a report by the citizen-led initiative Cambridge News Matters on the importance of local news as reason for the group’s interest in Cambridge Day.

“Cambridge, Massachusetts wants, needs, and deserves high quality local news and it has the means to deliver it, meeting the wide-ranging interests of a diverse population,” the report states.

“When we did our research, there was no paper in Cambridge that was doing that at the level that was needed,” Harriman said.

Cambridge Day’s expansion arrives amidst a yearslong decline across the city’s media landscape.

The Cambridge Chronicle — a weekly newspaper that covered local news in Cambridge — currently lacks a full-time staff and print publication after widespread cost reductions following the merger between its former owner, GateHouse Media, and the media conglomerate Gannett. The merger left Cambridge without a dedicated local newspaper for the first time in more than 150 years.

Although newspapers such as The Crimson and the Boston Globe have expanded their coverage of Cambridge in recent years, Levy said that existing coverage of the city is not enough.

“The Boston Globe has made commitment after commitment after commitment after commitment to local news and to Cambridge and Somerville, and it ebbs and flows and it waxes and it wanes,” Levy said.

“Having a local paper that does only Cambridge and Somerville is a guarantee that there’s always going to be that focus,” he added.

The trajectory of the expansion is yet to be set in stone, and Levy emphasized that “nothing is changing immediately.”

“One of my goals this weekend is to try to coordinate thoughts and make some suggestions to the board about directions that they could go in terms of making expenditures for staff,” Levy said.

—Staff writer Matan H. Josephy can be reached matan.josephy@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @matanjosephy.

—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.