North End news site to cease publishing

Matt Conti reports he will be winding down his work on NorthEndWaterfront.com and he and his staff will stop posting new items altogether in January.

The site and its e-mail newsletter have been the main source of news for the North End - and the burgeoning waterfront area - since 2009, providing not just articles, but videos of community meetings and hearings, feature photos highlighting the unique events and scenes in the neighborhoods and a place for residents to discuss the news.

Simply put, the site has over-stretched our technical and part-time limits as an ad-hoc operation. Year after year, I wondered how long I could sustain this community news experiment. We scrambled to publish multiple articles daily without any full-time staff on a platform never intended to “scale,” nor to be a decade-plus business project. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, I decided we had to continue at least through year-end. From here, the site would need an untenable investment in people and technology. I have follow-on ideas, however, I do not plan to replace NorthEndWaterfront.com at this time.