A national group based in Northampton successfully lobbied to get the state of New Jersey to fund local journalism. The group is now trying to get Massachusetts to do the same thing. The following local newspapers are owned by out-of-state corporations: Hampshire Gazette, Amherst Bulletin, Springfield Republican, Greenfield Recorder, and Valley Advocate. The Brattleboro Reformer and Keene Sentinel are owned by local rich people.

The Northampton group has a web page at:

https://www.freepress.net/news/new-jersey-legislature-and-governor-murph...

The group's snail mail address is near the bottom of this web page:

https://www.freepress.net/privacy-and-copyright

Florence is a village in the city of Northampton.

Sarah Stone works for the group, Free Press. On November 26, she told the Valley Post that Free Press is trying to get Massachusetts to do the same thing New Jersey did.

In 2022, the Boston Globe reported the the Brattleboro Reformer daily newspaper was owned by Paul Belagour. The November 28, 2025 edition of the Reformer says on page A5 that there is at least one other owner. The paper's publisher did not immediately reply to an email asking who the other owner or owners are.

In 2005, the Northampton group organized the National Conference for Media Reform in Memphis, Tennessee. At the conference, the 3,500 or so people in the audience cheered when U.S. senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont proclaimed, “American media corporations are as responsible as President Bush for the disaster we now face in Iraq.”

Chris Cook, a former news editor at the San Francisco Bay Guardian who, as of 2024, was writing for the Los Angeles Times and other publications, told the Valley Post in 2015, “People underestimate how serious the effects on democracy of the loss of journalists in the United States will be. People are very blithe: ‘Oh, we’ll just start blogs.’” But, he added, new models are needed. “A private company owning a newspaper and running corporate advertising is not independent.”