Welcome to Needham Local

Welcome to Needham Local, a news service of the Needham Channel.

Needham Local is the foundation of what we hope will be a community-wide, collaborative undertaking that establishes a vibrant, sustainable local news ecosystem.

For 40 years, the Needham Channel (TNC) has been a community resource, bringing news, sports, public access, education, entertainment & municipal meeting coverage to Needham. Since 1987, TNC has produced a 30-minute weekly newscast, bringing grounded coverage of town events and issues.

When the “Needham Cable News” premiered, there were two local newspapers in Needham – The Needham Times and the Needham Chronicle – with multiple reporters covering all aspects of community life. Now the media landscape is vastly different. The papers have largely vanished, and the need for consistent and reliable town-based news is greater than ever.

Over the last decade, as the newspaper industry has steadily declined and disinvested in local coverage, the Needham Channel has grown our staff. We have leveraged technology to extend our reach. Our programming is available virtually anywhere, through cablecasting, live streaming, providing programming online on-demand, and most recently through a new, free Roku channel (with other streaming providers to come).

As the decline of local papers accelerated, we began to explore how to expand upon our work to fill the vacuum left behind. We have always had a strong journalistic core built around our weekly newscast. We have been steadily increasing other public affairs programming and developing longer-form stories within and beyond our weekly newscast, the Needham Channel News.

Needham Local is the next important step on that journey.

It is a community news hub structured to present town residents and businesses with a forum exploring issues that affect them, in a format that is appealing and informative. It presents and builds upon the wide-ranging news and public affairs coverage produced through the Needham Channel.

Needham Local will extend information and resources beyond what can be shared in a video-only format. To that end, we are currently hiring a new Community Reporter/Digital Media Editor to create and integrate more comprehensive, longer format stories and analysis.

This is only the beginning. The site has a distinct identity to facilitate experimentation and collaboration in building a comprehensive local news ecosystem.

We invite you to engage with us to help build the future of local news for Needham.