12.27.2024

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Marking a milestone: Contrarian Boston celebrates three years in business and looks ahead to big issues we’ll be covering in 2025

We launched Contrarian Boston in late November 2021 to help fill the growing void in local news.

A little over three years later, we have more than 13,000 subscribers, including several hundred with paid subscriptions.

Your support helps us break stories and dig beneath the happy talk and self-serving rhetoric to get at what’s really happening in the Boston area.

Here are some of the stories and issues we’ll be reporting on in 2025:

• Shining a light on local government: From Boston down to the smallest country town, major decisions made by local officials too often go unreported amid the closure of local newspapers. This has led to unchecked nepotism, cronyism and corruption.

• Housing crisis: We have some of the country’s highest prices and rents thanks to a decades long decline in new home and apartment construction. We’ll continue to report on what’s happening on the state, national and local levels to address an issue that is forcing middle class families and others to flee the state.

  

  Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash

• Performance of local schools: Like local government, this is another area where the decline of local news outlets has been bad news for parents, students, taxpayers and anyone else with a stake in our educational system. Large districts like Boston are spending huge amounts of money with questionable results. Too little attention is paid in the local media to what is actually taught in the classroom and whether it is effective or not.

• State government and the Legislature: We have one of the most non-transparent governments and state legislatures in the country, with anemic public records laws. As is the case with local government, this secrecy too often leads to bad results, including inflated pay and cronyism at some agencies. We’ll also be closely following the state’s teachers union, which has emerged as a major force in state politics as it pushes controversial proposals, such as legalizing classroom strikes.

• Local media: We’ll continue to keep a close eye on the Globe and our local NPR stations, as they report on local politics and issues, and we’ll call them out when there are conflicts or undue favoritism shown to their favored progressive pols. We’ll also continue to report on the myriad of local news startups that have begun popping up in towns, suburbs, and cities across the Boston area.

• Economic development and construction: The shift to remote work and the hike in interest rates forced developers to shelve major office, lab and residential projects across Greater Boston this past year. We’ll be reporting on what’s happening with various projects and looking for signs of recovery in 2025.

• Sports business: The biggest local sports business story right now is Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s controversial push to build a $200 million pro soccer stadium in historic Franklin Park. We’ll continue to cast a skeptical eye on that plan. And with another soccer stadium slated for Everett and the Celtics up for sale, there will be much else to report on as well.

• Energy transition: There is too much uncritical reporting of state and local energy policies and whether the huge bet on wind and solar will pay off, especially with the loss of the state’s only nuclear plant. Much of the so-called climate reporting in the mainstream media is simply cheerleading for a narrow set of solutions championed by progressives, with little if any room for debate or common sense.

• Local and state politics: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu will be up for reelection in 2025. Will Josh Kraft throw his hat in the ring? Will Sen. Ed Markey, up for reelection in 2026, face a primary challenger? Stay tuned.

• The emerging cannabis industry: The rollout of the cannabis legalization in Massachusetts has been a disaster for many would-be pot entrepreneurs thanks to a completely dysfunctional state regulator. The public is only seeing the tip of the iceberg when it comes to conflicts of interest and other shenanigans at the Cannabis Control Commission.

• Our endless transportation woes: Getting from A to B anywhere in the Boston area can be a challenge with mounting traffic and a T that seems to be improving but still has long, long way to go.

• Battle over illegal immigration: Massachusetts now finds itself on the front lines in this long-running story, with the state now spending more than $1 billion a year on its shelter system. And now we have a looming clash between local and state leaders and the Trump administration over sanctuary cities.

• The disaster formerly known as the Massachusetts health care system: The Steward disaster and the shutdown of local hospitals in its wake highlighted just how much of a mess our state’s health care system is. We pay more for health care in Massachusetts than just about any other state to support a system that is both bloated and chaotic, with a few big hospitals and insurers ruling the roost, to the detriment of patients and consumers.

  

  The Steward Health Care disaster brought to a halt work on a new Norwood Hospital, closed in 2020 after a disastrous flood.

• Extremism on campus: The support for Hamas and the radical, looney rhetoric on display on campuses locally in the wake of the Oct. 7th massacre of more than 1,200 Israeli men, women and children was an eye opener for many people. In particular, it demonstrated how far the culture on today’s college campuses has drifted from mainstream America. It is a trend that campus administrators want to sweep under the rug and it’s one we will be following and reporting on.

  Don’t see an issue you are interested in and would like us to cover? We love tips, story ideas and suggestions on issues to cover, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

  Happy holidays and looking forward to a very newsy 2025.