Stories Around Boston.

Welcome to the Student Dispatch

Eitan Hersh

Welcome to the Student Dispatch, a news outlet focused on stories and analysis in Massachusetts. We have started Student Dispatch with two goals in mind. First, we want to help fill the gap in state and local news coverage. Massachusetts, like the rest of the country, has witnessed a major collapse in local journalism over the last several decades. Many important stories are left untold. All of the stories written for Student Dispatch are about the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

 Our reporting will introduce readers to our communities’ power brokers and policy entrepreneurs, organizers and upstarts. We are interested in how power flows through our cities and towns, who is in charge and what they want, who is left out and what they need. We are interested not in horse race coverage of political campaigns nor in tidbits of breaking news, but in the relationships and institutions that make things happen here.

The second goal of Student Dispatch is training the next generation of writers and citizens.  We are starting Student Dispatch as a pilot program with ten outstanding college writers, all juniors at Tufts University (and big shout-out to the Tisch College of Civic Life for funding this pilot program). Our ambition is for students across the state’s many colleges and universities to soon join us. We want students to be paid or receive course credit for their writing and we want them to be guided by professional mentors and editors. Eventually, we’d like to help chapters of Student Dispatch start in other cities and states as well.

As a pilot program, our ten initial journalists will be writing under the joint supervision of myself and the award-winning author and editor, Rachel Slade. Slade spent a decade at Boston Magazine, as writer and editor, working on many stories about Massachusetts. She is also the author of the bestseller Into the Raging Sea. With professional mentorship and peer support, we aim to help students learn more about their communities and more about how to communicate about their communities.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing a stream of stories. Some of our stories will be co-published by Commonwealth Magazine. We hope you will read them, engage with them, and share them with your friends and neighbors. Please join our newsletter (studentdispatch.substack.com) or follow our work here on our website. And please be in touch with feedback. This is an experiment. We need your help in making it a success!