We’re all in this together

Welcome to the beta version of The Cambridge Somerville Independent – a news site intended to be an active part of an ecosystem that keeps Cambridge and Somerville thriving, especially in rough times. We hoped to present a grander, more feature-rich website immediately upon launch; now we just want to get the site started and improve as we go.

We believe in partnerships, mutual aid, connections and signal boosting; we want to be responsive in this moment of national crisis. We want to help readers find what they need and organizations and businesses communicate with their audiences. We intend to have fun, share the delightful and joyous, and sometimes be a little weird. We want the arts to flourish and for people to feel heard. We want to be nimble, bringing items of interest to people as quickly as we responsibly can.

We would love The Independent to pay our journalists what they need to help them live and stay in these expensive cities – and journalism is expensive, and so is living here. But we also welcome citizen journalism and other work in a cooperative sense: We invite team members who want to offer their skills because it brings them pleasure, or because it is their form of civic engagement.

A lot of these efforts will be modest and perhaps halting, because we have limited resources and only so many hours in the day. We want to do it all, but won’t be able to. We will have to prioritize and evolve. You can support our mission: Please donate or give tax free, the bigger the donation the better! We also encourage businesses and organizations to take out display ads. We have special rates for people within the community.

To talk about any of these things, you can get in touch with one of our founding team members by emailing editor@csindie.com or calling (617) 230-9632. If there is no immediate pickup, your call will be returned as soon as possible.