The Melrose Mirror Ceases publication

The Melrose Mirror, an online community journal published monthly by a group of Melrose seniors who called themselves the Silver Stringers, published its final issue on November 2017. The Mirror was the longest continuing community website in the world — 21 years

The Stringers no longer had sufficient volunteer technical expertise to maintain the site,

It was a national model for similar groups in Revere, Mass., and Rye, New Hampshire as well as internationally in Finland, Ireland, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico and elsewhere.

It was also a model for the award-winning Junior Journal, a website for and by teenagers from around the world. The Journal’s publication lasted seven years

The Mirror was created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in conjunction with Jack Driscoll the retired editor of the Boston Globe.

The Mirror’s monthly issues were a collection of stories written by Melrose people who wrote about a wide collection of experiences that involved the city, national events such as World War II, the Great Depression, and national and local political issues. In many instances the stories were based on the writer’s personal experience with these events.

Some local political stories were social commentaries which were investigative in nature and citied city documents to show how some city projects were planned and implemented as opposed to how the city represented the plans to the public.

A very large number of the stories involved nostalgic memories of Melrose people and their experiences of growing up in Melrose. These were not stories written by professional writers but by local people who submitted them to the Mirror

The Melrose Mirror is no longer accessible online but all of its issues and stories have been archived. Efforts are being made to make the archive available online in a special website.