Establishment allies back Northampton “Information Hub”

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This fall was the culmination of an intense election cycle in Northampton, where tensions had, to put it mildly, boiled over. 

School funding and a big redesign of downtown were just some of the issues that had torn apart factions supporting Mayor Gina Louise Sciarra, who won re-election by just 79 votes, and a slate of challengers seeking to replace her and her City Council allies. Both sides had accused each other of trafficking in personal attacks and misinformation — conversations that have grown so heated that in January, after the election, the mayor’s husband apologized publicly for yelling at one of Sciarra’s loudest critics in a grocery-store aisle.

As the dust settled in the spring, though, a new player appeared on Facebook, the venue of some of the harshest mudslinging in city politics. The Northampton Information Hub, as it is known, billed itself as a different kind of politics. Whoever was behind the page began posting sleek infographics about the city’s upcoming budget debate. The page promised to cut through misinformation and “strong feelings” by encouraging “informed and constructive civic conversation.”

“Our goal is to break things down so you understand what is actually happening and can form your own opinion,” the organization wrote in an unsigned post in late March. “No pressure. No BS.”

But in a city whose politics have become deeply divided, the organization immediately drew ire from the mayor’s opponents. They were quick to point out that the Northampton Information Hub’s posts closely aligned with the policy preferences of the mayor and her allies. While some posts explain basic civic concepts — how state education funding works and what it means for a public body to have a “quorum” — others seem to defend the mayor and her stances on hot-button issues. 

One infographic, for example, highlighted the benefits of the “Picture Main Street” redesign of downtown. The project aims to make Main Street more accessible and safer but has its detractors, especially among Sciarra’s critics. And in another post, the page’s author used a bar chart to imply that a “fiscal stability plan” the mayor supports was an explanation for “a pretty clear shift upward” in education funding over the past decade. Critics were quick to point out that the chart didn’t tell the whole story.

“How does one explain the seemingly large increases while at the same time cutting jobs and reducing services?” one commenter asked.

And when those behind the page — and the newly created nonprofit behind it — revealed who they were, it fanned the flames further. 

The founders of the hub — Abby Spector, Jessica Dawson, Jennifer Nery, and Joshua Silver — all deny that they’re partisans. In interviews, they told The Shoestring that the goal of the organization is to make city politics more accessible by explaining key concepts and issues in a more comprehensible manner. They say it’s a need that local news outlets have not been able to meet. 

“People don’t want to feel dumb,” Spector said. “They don’t want to feel like they don’t understand or like they’re called out for not knowing something they should.”

But critics are quick to note that the founders’ loyalties seem to lie with the political establishment. All of them, for example, have publicly supported the mayor’s policies or her allies. And Nery was the treasurer for the campaign of City Councilor Laurie Loisel, who ousted a major opponent of the mayor, Quaverly Rothenberg, in November. 

“This is not an unbiased nonprofit,” Ian Goodman, a critic of the hub, said. “This is the mouthpiece for an administration.”

Operating mainly on Facebook, the Northampton Information Hub follows in the footsteps of other political factions in town, like Support Our Schools, which began as a Facebook page and soon spawned into a movement against Sciarra’s education budgets. There’s also Public Comment Northampton — a Facebook page that bills itself as “Independent Opposition Media” and now has over 1,500 members. As of early this month, the Northampton Information Hub page has over 450 followers and gets consistent engagement in the post’s comment section.

However, the info hub is a new development in Northampton’s political war in other ways. The page is run by a nonprofit that hasn’t disclosed its donors to the public. Organizers declined to say who’s funding the project when The Shoestring asked. (Silver said a list of donors would be released with the hub’s form 990, the tax document nonprofits that take in over $50,000 yearly have to file. However, donor lists are not included in the 990 information the IRS makes available for public inspection.) And although the group did eventually disclose its leadership in a post, that information appears nowhere on the site’s bio on Facebook or Instagram.

Spector, who the organization pays to create its social-media content, also said that she’s using generative AI to create content for the page.

Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University who researches, among other topics, journalism ethics and local news, said that as local news outlets across the country cut staff, sources of reliable information shrink with them. And while the press struggles to provide as much coverage as they used to, Kennedy says it’s easy for others to go online and provide information, regardless of whether it’s accurate or not.

“At a time when there’s such a shortage of reliable local nodes, I don’t think any of us should have a problem with politically active people, even local officials, getting good reliable news out to the public,” Kennedy told The Shoestring. “But they need to disclose what their ties are.”

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Spector, a mother of two, is the Northampton Information Hub staffer behind the page’s explainers and summaries on issues ranging from city projects to funding sources. This past election cycle, she said she got more involved in city politics and found that there was a lot that she didn’t understand. And when she looked to get answers online, she had a hard time finding them.

“What I found was just what felt like a lot of vitriol and anger and not a lot of clear information,” Spector said. “It really felt like a gap or a hole, something that was missing. It was more personal attacks or partial information.”

She wasn’t alone in that feeling. 

The other founding members of the hub also felt that there was both a lack of quality information about local politics and a need for more spaces to discuss it. Through meetings at political events, fundraisers, and City Council meetings, the members said that the continued conversations led to the creation of the Northampton Information Hub. 

“The question became: ‘Is there a way to remedy this? Is there a way to take these complex issues in an objective, non-agenda way, but just like make them more understandable to people?’” Silver, the president of the Northampton Information Hub, said.

Spector watches the hours-long local governance meetings and takes notes, usually posting her takeaways within a few days. She said that she distills the meeting down into key points and a short summary, including the votes that city officials make during the meeting. She said that she uses generative AI to assist in that summary generation.

Generative AI is a deeply contentious issue in the world of journalism ethics and beyond, given that it also has disproportionate environmental impacts on poor communities and neighborhoods that are predominantly Black and brown.

Spector said she uses AI as a reliability checker for notes, to see if her takeaways align with the ones that the model generates, but that she’s careful in how much she uses it. She also has AI generate data visualizations for her summaries. 

“I try not to lean entirely on AI or too much on AI, because I think we’ve become really desensitized or familiar with an AI interface when we see it,” Spector said. “I make a pretty intentional effort to not have things look very AI.”

Spector’s position is the only paid one, and she said she’s employed as a contractor. The rest of the founding members are part of the executive board. According to Silver, the position is funded through donors, though he declined to say who.

Though the hub has its critics, some of them have said they appreciate the space for discourse that the organization is facilitating. Some who spoke with The Shoestring have said that they appreciate being able to engage in discussions about city politics without name calling and personal attacks. The hub has specific community guidelines that say disagreement is allowed, but users who engage in derogatory behavior will be banned from the forum. 

Where the Northampton Information Hub sources its information from has been a point of contention. The majority of its posts are based on data that the city provides, though it sometimes also draws from the Daily Hampshire Gazette. 

“The best we can do is continuously be transparent, source our information, and hopefully build that trust over time,” Dawson said. 

But with only one paid position, the limitations of the projects are clear.

Nery said that the Hub doesn’t have the capacity to “forensically investigate all the claims of the official city documents or state documents.” 

“At a certain point, we have to trust that there’s some self preservation for these city officials — that they wouldn’t want to go out and say something knowingly false because they could have legal repercussions for doing so,” Nery said. “You have to accept some fundamental groundwork that we can all begin from.”

Silver said that the information posted on the Hub isn’t partisan — that per the requirements of a nonprofit, it can’t be — but that doesn’t mean that members themselves aren’t political.

All members of the Northampton Information Hub have publicly supported specific city officials. Nery was the treasurer for Laurie Loisel’s campaign, who’s now the city councilor of Ward 3. Dawson has also been quoted in the Gazette, where she states that she voted for Loisel. 

Silver himself has written multiple op-eds for the Gazette, some of which support Sciarra’s policies. Spector has also posted about being supportive of the mayor on Facebook.

“We’re all humans and we have our opinions,” Silver said. “What matters is the content on the hub. 
And if there’s ever any content that is actually promoting one policy over another, one law over another, one politician over another, that’s a problem. But facts are facts.”

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Ian Goodman is an emergency pediatrician at Baystate Health, where he’s been working for 22 years — the same amount of time he’s lived in western Massachusetts. 

Goodman is also one of the biggest critics of the Northampton Information Hub.

Goodman started Fact Check Northampton, a Facebook page that he says aims to contextualize data from the Northampton Information Hub and other sources of information, like the Gazette. According to him, the data that the hub posts in particular often leads viewers to draw different conclusions than they would have if they had more information.

“A lot of what they’re saying is factually accurate when you look at it with one eye closed, squint the other eye, and miss all the stuff in the background,” Goodman said. “What they’ve been putting out is a really good example of how information can be factually accurate, but when missing context, can lead people to incorrect conclusions.”

According to him, his years of experience in reading papers and journal articles as an academic physician gave him the skills necessary to recognize statistical errors and signs of bias. Despite the organization’s non-partisan claims, Goodman said that the information that the Northampton Information Hub posts presents the mayor’s policies in a positive light.

Similar to Spector, Goodman also uses AI to generate his content.

Goodman is not alone in finding the Northampton Information Hub to be partisan.

Alan Simon moved to Northampton in recent years, but had previously lived in Windsor, Connecticut. There he served on the city council for 18 years and was the deputy mayor for six years. Simon ran for Northampton City Council in Ward 2 last year but lost to Deborah Klemer, a two-year incumbent and the council vice-president.

Like Goodman, Simon also feels that the Hub misrepresents the information that it posts, in large part due to using the city as the primary, and often only, source. 

“They’re selling a point of view by the way they introduce information,” Simon said. “They are willing to have a back and forth, which I really do appreciate. We actually do need debate and we haven’t been able to have that in this city because the mayor won’t meet with people.”

However, some say the problem is bigger than any one person.

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Northampton, like most communities across the country, has experienced shrinking local news coverage and declining trust in the journalists who remain. 

Kennedy, the Northeastern University professor, said that while it would be great if local communities had a dedicated reporter to cover local governance meetings, most don’t. He said that though there have been emerging digital-only and local initiatives to address the gap, most of them are unevenly distributed and centralized to communities with more resources — urban and affluent areas. 

In Northampton, the Gazette continues to cover Northampton’s government. But the once-larger publication that used to have bureaus across Hampshire County now has far fewer editorial staffers.

The thread that connects the Northampton Information Hub, its critics, and journalists like Kennedy is the shared agreement that the lack of local news has created a vacuum of reliable information.

Silver said that with the evisceration of public media and a lack of enough trained and experienced journalists at local news outlets, reliable information is hard to come by.

“There is a need for journalism. There’s a need for other additional ways for people to get access to the actual sourced, cited facts that can help them make informed decisions,” Silver said. “Because today, I think there are huge swaths of people in our city who have really good intentions and are being duped by misinformation that is being spread, particularly on social media.”

One report from the Pew Research Center found that engagement with local news has been decreasing in recent years. 

In 2016, nearly 40% of Americans were keeping up with their local news outlet. However, as of 2025, that number has decreased to 21%. On the other hand, the number of people receiving their news from online forums or discussions has been increasing — from 38% in 2018 to over half of Americans in 2025. 

“I think this is indicative of a lack of quality independent journalism. We’re so fortunate to have a newspaper, but we don’t have someone on this beat who is responsible for doing some really good in-depth analysis of whatever [the] City Council says or the mayor says,” Goodman said. “So much of what makes it into our local newspaper is sometimes nothing more than just repeating a press release — and certainly not with the amount of detail that is required to understand some of these complex issues.”

Local news has been on the decline for over 20 years. Since 2005, thousands of local news outlets have closed — including 206 just in the past year. Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism did release a report on the state of local news last year, though, which showed that local news is much more accessible in Massachusetts than many other states. 

Journalists and their allies have been fighting for legislative solutions to the local news crisis in Massachusetts, but none have been rolled out. Instead, major local news outlets like GBH and NEPM are merging. 

“There’s a vacuum for information that is verified. There’s a vacuum for information that has context,” Goodman said. “There’s a vacuum for information that comes from challenging people who deliver it, instead of just taking it from people who deliver it.”

For Simon, the lack of trust in the local government contributes to how residents are receiving and interpreting information. He doesn’t see another alternative except that city leaders need to “hit the road and meet people.” According to him, Northampton city officials lack transparency and connection with city residents and unfairly put the responsibility of civic engagement and understanding on community members.

“You put it all on the individual citizen instead of the responsible party, which are the people who hold the power and are able to communicate,” Simon said. “When you put it on the citizen, it’s just an excuse to do nothing.”

This post has been updated to correct the timeline between when members of the public asked the Northampton Information Hub about its founders and when the group disclosed that information in a Facebook post.

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