Welcome to The Minute
Most people want to know what's happening in town government in the place they live. Until now, there just hasn't been a practical way to keep up.
If you live here, the decisions that shape your life get made in public meetings you will probably never attend. Select board, planning, school committee,zoning, conservation, finance. This is where your local tax rate is set, where the new development gets approved or killed, and where the school budget gets re-organized. All of it's public, but few see it.
People care. Attending is just costly. Meetings run two or three hours, usually on weeknights and sometimes several in the same week. The recordings exist, but nobody plans their evenings to watch a zoning hearing on the chance something important comes up. And if you do, we think you might like your evenings back. When the official minutes do get posted it's weeks later, buried in a town website that was never built for finding anything, and lacking detail.
We used to have local papers for this. A reporter sat through the meeting so you didn't have to. In many towns around here that reporter is gone, and nothing replaced them. The meetings still happen and the decisions still get made, just in a room where fewer people are watching.
The Minute is our attempt to fix that. We cover the boards you're interested in but can't always attend and publish clear, accurate write-ups you can read in a couple of minutes: what was decided, what it means for you, and what questions the meeting left open. You can get the quick hits just to stay in the loop, read transcripts to drive into details, or track the issue that's important to you across town meetings.
We're starting here in the North Shore of Massachusetts, in towns we know, and going deep rather than wide. Every major board, every meeting, week after week. We believe consistency and speed makes the difference, with a reliable record of what your town government did this week. This isn't a replacement for journalism; we cherish the local papers that can interview stakeholders, research, inquire, and report. Perhaps we can be a tool in the journalist's arsenal too, helping local writers go further effectively.
Most people want to know what's happening in the place they live. Until now there hasn't been a practical way to keep up. Subscribe, read a few, and if we're missing something you care about, reach out.
— Ted