Help the Montague Reporter Redact Names

Help the Montague Reporter Redact Names from Past Police Logs

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/old-arrest-boston-globe-fresh-start/2021/01/22/122cbd0c-5cd1-11eb-b8bd-ee36b1cd18bf_story.html

Our goal in 2021 is to make the Montague Reporter more accessible online. We have a large online archive, but have kept it hidden from search engines for one reason: from 2002 to 2018, our local police logs included the names of arrestees. We are now launching a project to redact those names, so that we may make our archived issues searchable without causing potential harm to the communities we serve.

Not all arrests lead to prosecution, and even fewer to conviction. We feel that the potential harm in republishing the names of arrestees from our first 718 issues far outweighs any benefit of those names being kept on public record.

In the spirit of the Reporter’s mission of service to all those in our community, we keep subscription prices as low as possible, and we are only able to stay in print because many readers donate with their renewals. Given this, we have a limited budget that essentially covers the cost of weekly operation.

Funds raised here will cover the cost of two part-time freelance staff to work for up to 8 weeks, reading through these archived issues, and redacting all names reported in the police logs using PDF redaction software. We will also use the requested funds to cover the cost of licensing the software for two months, as well as any associated administrative costs for the project.

Once these names have been redacted, our digital archive will be made searchable via internet search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Anyone will finally be able to go online, search any subject, and come across related articles from nearly two decades of the Reporter.

Here is the breakdown of our monetary goal for transparency (we have rounded up to $3,500 to account for any fees GoFundMe may charge):

Project Staff/Labor - 175 hours at 17.74/hr

$3,091.19

+

Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 license

$49.98

+

10% Administrative Overhead:

$314.12

Total Cost:

$3,455.29