On April 30, veteran journalist Tom Stites visited NECC to talk to journalism and communications students about his newswebsite co-op project, Haverhill Matters.

Stites believes that Haverhill is a news desert. Stites coined the term. A news desert is an area lacking adequate local news coverage.

Haverhill is covered by The Eagle Tribune and The Haverhill Gazette. Both newspapers are owned by a corporation called Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. which is based out of Montgomery, Ala.
The Haverhill Gazette used to be an independently owned daily paper, but has since reduced its output to one paper a week.

There are no independently owned papers in Haverhill. There is a community access cable television program, HC Media, formerly known as Haverhill Community Television.

Stites hopes his news co-op idea will change the journalistic climate in Haverhill. Ideally, Haverhill Matters will be built by a community interested in civic engagement.

Members of the co-op will be actively engaged in deciding what should be covered in the city, and the coverage will be done by local people who care.

If Haverhill Matters succeeds, it will be the first ever co-operatively owned community news organization in the United States, according to Stites.

The organization backing the co-op is called the Banyan Project. Banyan hopes to create more journalism co-ops in different communities in order to improve the journalistic climate of the United States.
According to Banyan’s website, “[Our] purpose is to ensure that, despite failing newspapers, communities have the reliable news coverage and information they need. It is a robust response to an urgent need of our democracy.”

Stites hopes that projects like Haverhill Matters will give a voice to more people in the community, as opposed to only the wealthy having influence in the media and community.

Stites developed the Banyan Project with 27 other professionals and is using Haverhill Matters as his pilot.
Haverhill matters currently has 25 founding members. One member of NECC faculty, Professor Amy Callahan, is a consultant for the project.

“I invited Tom Stites to talk to our journalism-communication students because he is an accomplished veteran journalist and he is the force behind the pioneering, first of its kind journalism project right here in Haverhill,” said Callahan.

“I like to bring in speakers who can share interesting insight about the field of journalism so that my students can stay engaged.”

Journalism runs in the family for Stites. His father was a journalist for the Associated Press, and he worked his way through school. When Stites’s father was older, in his 50s and 60s, he told him not to be a journalist. Stites’s father had become disillusioned with the field.

Stites had no intention of becoming a journalist. However, when he was in his second year in college, he couldn’t find a summer job.

His father heard of an internship through the Managing Editor of the Kansas City Star and recommended Stites apply. From then on, Stites became a journalist, and his father supported his career.

Truth in journalism became important to Stites because, as his father used to say, “Journalism is supposed to be a school of truth,” and that “[a] journalist can become a paid conduit for a paid liar.”

So Stites wanted to work to eliminate the liars in newspapers.

Haverhill Matters is Stites’s way to bring the truth and fair coverage back to newspapers. The basic structure of the business is that there will be two full-time staff and one part time staff.

The full-time staff will be the Editor in Chief and the Executive Director. The Editor in Chief will be in charge of the journalism side of the co-op.

The Executive Director will be in charge of the business side. The part-time employee will be in charge of administrative duties. A group of freelance journalists will work under these three employees.

The co-op will be funded first by 200 people pledging $250 to the co-op as founding members. Afterwards, the goal would be raised to 500 founding members.

Additional co-op members would not be founding members, and they would pay $36 annually. The founding members would pay the same annual fee.

Haverhill Matters currently has 24 people pledging to pay the $250 when more people have signed on to be founding members of the co-op.

Stites plans to launch a Haverhill Matters-specific website soon, and he hopes to have a site up and publishing news by January 2015.