I hope this finds you and your family safe and well.
As you know, the coronavirus pandemic has reached communities across Massachusetts. We are seeing increasing numbers of people with COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, requiring hospitalization and, too often, intensive care. These people are neighbors, friends and colleagues. Many of us have lost loved ones.
Through it all, MassLive’s journalists have been reporting seven days a week about the latest spread of the infection across Massachusetts; the toll on health-care workers and first responders; school and business closures; and the devastating economic effect of stay-at-home orders on retail stores, the hospitality sector, and so many other businesses.
There is a reason we have worked so hard to make sure you have the news that matters most to you: The communities we serve are the communities we live in. I grew up in Northampton, delivered newspapers as a boy, attended college in Worcester and now work in Springfield in my 22nd year at MassLive. I care intimately about the vibrancy of our communities because Massachusetts is my home. I am not alone - all of our reporters, photographers and editors live here, too — they are your neighbors.
Throughout the pandemic, our first focus has been to deliver to our communities the news that affects them the most, when they need it.
When we launched a new text-messaging service dedicated to timely, trusted alerts about the coronavirus and its impact on lives in Massachusetts, more than 16,000 of you signed up in a two-week period. You asked questions, and we did our best to answer them. If we didn’t have the answer immediately, we chased it down over the following hours and days.
Yet our work doesn’t occur in a vacuum. So it probably won’t surprise you to learn that as businesses across the state have closed in response to the pandemic, advertising, the overwhelming source of the revenue that supports our vital work, has been dealt a substantial blow.
We need your help. I am writing today to ask you to support MassLive as a subscriber. It’s $10 a month, and your subscription directly powers the work of our newsrooms across Massachusetts: the stories we publish on our website, the email newsletters we deliver to your inbox, our text-messaging services, our mobile apps, our videos and our presences on Facebook and Twitter.
This is a first for MassLive, an opportunity to be among the founding subscribers of the site, to be on the ground floor of helping quality, reliable local journalism grow for years to come. In February, MassLive was named the best website in New England by the New England Newspaper & Press Association among seven NENPA awards across sports, news and column writing. Your support will help that tradition of excellence continue for years to come.
Local news is part of the fabric of our local communities, here in Massachusetts, and across the United States, and everywhere the future of local journalism is threatened.
Why does this matter to you?
At the highest level great journalism educates and helps sustain democratic values and holds those in power accountable.
But on a daily basis it just as importantly helps inform our work, our learning, our play - and during the pandemic it continues to provide the local information that helps keep your family healthy and safe.
If you have a news tip, or you want your local business covered, or you’re looking for updates on your kids’ high school sports teams, you can’t call Google or Facebook and ask them to send over a reporter. If you see a story on your social media feed, that story was originally written by a local news site like MassLive. If you have a news tip, or a concern with a story, you can call MassLive, and we’ll get back to you.
Our journalists cover Main Street — your Main Street — in Springfield, Worcester and Boston, from the Berkshires to the Cape.
When Massachusetts communities are ready to get back to work and school, when going out to your favorite restaurant with friends and loved ones is part of our lives again, MassLive will be there with reliable, accurate local news you’ll need.
Local news you can trust is more important now than ever. We hope you think it’s worth $10 a month. Thank you again for trusting MassLive to deliver the news Massachusetts depends on. Please support our important work by subscribing.