A new restaurant opens down the street. Word spreads about a proposal to raise parking fines. Financial unease continues to pressure institutions across town. For Sam Mintz and Vivi Smilgius, these stories only scratch the surface of the work done at Brookline.News.
Brookline.News is the sole professional news outlet operating in Brookline. Mintz is its founding editor, and Smilgius is his associate reporter. They are joined by general manager Michael Manning, who handles business operations. Mintz, Smilgius and Manning are the only full-time employees on staff. For the past three years, they have handled news coverage across town and, amid staffing challenges and the search for ways to expand, Brookline.News has remained loyal to its values as a nonprofit, hyperlocal news outlet.
The inception of Brookline.News follows a movement of similar hyperlocal, nonprofit outlets emerging after the massive newspaper conglomerate, Gannett Media, since rebranded as USA Today, shut down numerous print weeklies across Massachusetts in 2022. The discontinuation of the Brookline Tab in April of that year left a gap in the town’s professional news coverage.
Ellen Clegg, an active board member and co-founder of Brookline.News, said a team of six Brookline residents recognized the void in local coverage and felt obligated to step in.
“We live our lives here on the ground, in Brookline,” Clegg said. “We think deeply about trash pickup or snow shoveling — our immediate environment. That’s what we’re trying to supply. [Brookline.News] helps people, it helps inform voters, it helps us all hopefully find commonality.”
After months of discussion, the team decided to file for a nonprofit. Their first newsletter rolled out in March of 2023, and they launched the Brookline.News website two months later.
Mintz and Smilgius pitch, report, write and edit together. Smilgius said they can juggle up to six stories at a time, and Mintz said he frequently works during evenings and weekends. Even then, Brookline.News relies on freelance writers to contribute articles. According to Clegg, these writers often come through partnerships with journalism students at Boston University and Brandeis University. Smilgius did similar freelance work while attending Emerson College before joining Brookline.News full-time in 2025.
Manning said that figuring out what the next three to five years will look like is a major goal for Brookline.News. Clegg said this could mean expanding social media or hiring more reporters. However, according to Manning, the publication’s nonprofit model impedes their ability to hire additional full-time employees.
“However much money we raise determines how many people we can hire. If we were running this as a private company, we might go raise money from investors or venture capitalists,” Manning said.
Instead, according to Clegg, Brookline.News receives funding from individual donors, foundations, sponsors and ticketed events. Manning said donations can range from $50 annually to thousands. He said securing those donations involves aggressive campaigning and can sometimes only succeed due to the generosity of a select few. Still, he said challenges remain.
“We’re smaller, which means we’ve got two reporters, so there are many more stories that Sam would like to write that we can’t,” Manning said. “That’s the biggest constraint right now.”
Brookline.News is actively seeking to hire a third full-time reporter. Mintz said that their limited staff forces them to make difficult choices on what to cover. On the other hand, Mintz said that a smaller newsroom also has benefits.
“There are fewer layers of bureaucracy. At other places I’ve worked, sometimes you’ll deal with editors weighing in for the wrong reasons,” Mintz said. “Not that we don’t have a rigorous editorial process, but I do think we can move quickly when necessary.”
According to Mintz, annual readership surveys demonstrate that the public response to Brookline.News has been fantastic. He said he acknowledges that tracking direct influence is more difficult to measure, but he said their biggest impact followed their coverage of the Flock surveillance camera controversy in October, where Chestnut Hill Realty had intended to install the unwanted license plate readers in Hancock Village in South Brookline. But according to Mintz, after Brookline.News reported on the issue and brought it to wider audiences, heavy backlash derailed the installation of the cameras.
“It really blew up. People were really bothered by it, people in positions of authority. It became a hot issue at [town] meetings for a while, and ultimately, [Chestnut Hill Realty] backed down,” Mintz said. “I feel like if we hadn’t reported on it, nobody would have known it was happening, and it would have just happened. People would have been surveilled without knowing it.”
Beyond the Flock cameras, Brookline.News has covered beats as casual as new businesses and as pressing as the tax override. Mintz and Smilgius both said the proximity and immediate relevance of their stories to Brookline residents define their work. However, neither started their career at hyperlocal publications. Mintz, for example, worked at the regional Cape Cod Times, then covered transportation with Politico in Washington, D.C., before his return to Massachusetts. The founders of Brookline.News brought him on in 2023, during the early months of development. Since then, Mintz said keeping the community in mind has become one of his mottos.
“We came from the community, we exist for the community and we were created by the community,” Mintz said. “It’s what brings me back to why I enjoy the work, why it’s different from past work and why I feel motivated to do it well.”
