WBJ Editor Brad Kane
Updated: October 3, 2022
From the Editor
From the editor: Going back on the road
At WBJ, we strive to be the go-to source for business news throughout all of Central Massachusetts. That geography extends as far east as Natick, west to Harwick, north to the New Hampshire border, and south to the Connecticut and Rhode Island borders.
Central Mass. is a tricky market to cover for business news, though, given how provincial all of New England is, the pull of Boston, and the number of news deserts in the region. In late September, I discovered a Northborough tech firm had announced plans for a $325-million facility in Georgia back in February, and we missed the news entirely. Since Worcester is the economic center of Central Mass., WBJ is headquartered in the city, and Worcester is literally in the name of this publication, it is very easy for us to default to our coverage skewing heavily toward Worcester business news.
Before COVID struck, the WBJ newsroom was doing a decent job of covering all the non-Worcester areas of the region: Blackstone Valley, North County, MetroWest, Central Mass South. But once the pandemic hit, face-to-face meetings fell off the calendar, travel out of the newsroom subsided, and our coverage defaulted to being too Worcester-centric.
Now, we’re working to rebuild those bridges. Over the summer, WBJ news staff held a couple of sitdown sessions with business leaders in Blackstone Valley and North County, and we have plans to have similar meetings in MetroWest and Central Mass South. Turning one meeting into comprehensive business coverage of an entire region takes time, but those connections are once again being forged.
You see a little bit of those efforts in the Oct. 3 print edition of WBJ, where the main subjects for the two longest feature stories are from Fitchburg and Framingham. In his “Fitchburg's artistic legacy drives downtown's economic development efforts” story, Staff Writer Timothy Doyle writes of the many ways Fitchburg is trying to center downtown revitalization around the city’s artistic legacy. Separately, Staff Writer Kevin Koczwara writes in his “Beer’s (almost) missing ingredient” story about how breweries in Framingham are finding ways to adapt to a carbon dioxide shortage.
In being Central Massachusetts’ source for business news, we recognize we’ll have to continually get out of our comfort zone to meet the players and understand the complexities of the entire region’s economy. And we remain committed to doing so.
– Brad Kane, editor
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