by Lisa Aciukewicz and Sue Robbins ·
Friday, March 20, 2026
Last Saturday night felt like quite a victory for the Harvard Press. We won the General Excellence award for small weeklies at the New England Newspaper & Press Association conference in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. In the past four years, we’ve won that award twice (2025, 2022), placed second (2024), and third (2023). What a payoff for our writers, editors, proofreaders, photographers, and columnists for the hard work they put in week after week!
But we certainly don’t work in a vacuum. We know that we exist because of the tremendous financial support we get from the community.
We are lucky to have many committed advertisers. They finance the majority of the newsroom and are essential to our survival. We hope you, as readers, support their businesses while shopping locally.
When we launched our sustaining subscriber campaign in 2016, we didn’t know then what we know now. Without sustaining subscribers we wouldn’t be in business! The economics of local news has only gotten more challenging each year. Our sustainers are the life blood of the paper; they’re a life raft in a turbulent sea. When you contribute as a sustainer, you help us meet our operating costs—printing, modest salaries, insurance, and utilities. Paying extra for your subscription and contributing a little more goes directly to our bottom line.
The addition of the Harvard Press Fund for Local Journalism in November 2025 gives us a path forward and room to think about ways to expand our coverage in the future. In the past five months it has helped cover the cost of training new journalists and offered our current staff professional development opportunities like attending workshops at the NENPA conference. It’s vitally important in keeping us at the forefront of local journalism. These larger donations recognize the importance of newspapers in upholding a democracy by informing and educating Harvard residents on what they need to know to fully participate in the running of the town. And it offers a mechanism for tax-deductible contributions, which we cannot accept directly.
So please, join us in thanking the many minds and hands that put together the Harvard Press each week. And if you feel so moved, please consider becoming a sustainer or making a larger donation to the Harvard Press Fund for Community Journalism.
Lisa Aciukewicz and Sue Robbins are co-owners and publishers of the Press.