Essex Media Group

Essex Media Group is a Lynn media company formed in 2014 to buy The Daily Item, a newspaper that had been family-owned since 1877. The Item remains its flagship, publishing six days a week and covering Lynn, Lynnfield, Marblehead, Nahant, Peabody, Revere, Saugus and Swampscott. The company describes itself as a 150-year-old start-up, pairing a long-running print paper with a subscription website and a daily email newsletter called Daily Digest.

Within its first decade, the group expanded into a portfolio of about ten publications. It launched three town magazines named for their zip codes and the Spanish-language newspaper La Voz, revived North Shore Golf magazine, and acquired Lynnfield Weekly News, Peabody Weekly News and Suburban Real Estate News. In 2022 it added Marblehead Weekly News. Ownership rests with seven investors who have direct ties to Lynn and the North Shore.

What to Know

• Civil War veteran Horace Hastings and three of his sons founded The Daily Item.
• The Hastings and Gamage families ran the paper until the 2014 sale.
• The company employs 26 full-time staff based in downtown Lynn.
• The Daily Digest newsletter reaches about 20,000 opt-in subscribers each day.
• The Item’s website draws roughly a million page views a month.