Four bylines appear on this site. Each one covers a beat and writes about it consistently, which is the point of a masthead: you learn who covers taxes and who covers flood, and the voice stays the same from one piece to the next.
None of them is a real person's legal name. They are pen names for the RE413 desk, which is a long-standing and entirely ordinary practice in publishing. We are telling you because you should not have to work it out.
What we do not do is more important than the names themselves. There are no photographs, no biographies, no claimed qualifications, no invented career histories and no social media accounts behind these bylines. Fabricating a credential would give you a false reason to trust a number, and every number here should be trusted on its source instead.
That is the arrangement, and it is why every article on this site states the public body that published each figure and the period the figure covers. If a piece says a tax rate is set by the town and reported to the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, you can check it against the Department of Revenue. The byline is a signature on the writing. The source is the authority for the fact.
If we find a figure wrong, we correct it and the page carries the correction. Public records contain errors and we republish them faithfully, so if something here disagrees with a town's own records, the town is right and we would like to hear about it. Use the contact form.
The four
- J. Merrick Hale. Writes on property tax, town finance and what a house costs to hold.
- Rosalind Fay. Writes on prices, sales, turnover and who is moving where.
- Abel Toussaint. Writes on construction, permits, zoning, land and infrastructure.
- Winnie Okafor. Writes on flood, water, heating and environmental record.
More on how the whole site is built and paid for is on the about page, and the full sourcing is at sources and method.