Karen Bordeleau started her career in local news before pivoting to teaching. Now she’s managing a new nonprofit news site in New Bedford.
When Karen Bordeleau was a teenager, she watched the Watergate scandal unfold. Around that time, her parents bought her a copy of “The New Journalism” by Tom Wolfe.
These two events sparked Bordeleau’s journalistic ambitions and a subsequent 40-plus year career that includes being part of a team that received a Pulitzer Prize nomination and becoming the first woman to serve as executive editor of The Providence Journal.
“I was watching the nightly news and fascinated by it. … I couldn’t believe two metro reporters could bring down an American president by diligently going after information,” said Bordeleau, who graduated from Northeastern University’s journalism school in 1982. “And then, here I am with (this book) with this new way of writing non-fiction stories. I thought, ‘Wow, you could tell stories as if they’re fiction but you’re using facts.’ I was just hooked.”
Bordeleau landed her first newsroom job while she was still in high school, writing for The Kent County Daily Times near her hometown of West Warwick, Rhode Island. When it came time for college, she was set on not only studying journalism, but attending Northeastern.
“My parents wanted me to stay in-state,” Bordeleau said. “I insisted. I really wanted to participate in the co-op program. It was really one of the only strong internship programs at the time. I actually told my parents ‘I will not go to college unless I go to Northeastern.’”
Once at Northeastern, Bordeleau threw herself into the journalism program. She did two co-ops, one at the Boston Globe and one at The Call, a daily newspaper in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.
Bordeleau’s high school and college experiences helped her build the skills and connections to launch her career. After graduating from Northeastern, she served as the managing editor for The Kent County Daily Times and The Call before joining The Providence Journal in 1996 as a copy editor. She worked her way up the ranks and in 2013, she became the first woman to serve as executive editor of the daily newspaper.
“It took a long time to get through that glass ceiling, but it happened,” she said. “I truly got to work with some of the best, and that certainly is the case at the Providence Journal. I loved working there. I loved every single minute.”
While at The Journal, Bordeleau covered elections, hurricanes and blizzards, where she and her staff of reporters hunkered down in the newsroom for days on end.
In February 2003, a fire broke out during a show at a nightclub in West Warwick. The Station nightclub fire was the fourth-deadliest nightclub fire in United States history, killing 100 people and injuring over 200.
The Providence Journal launched a yearlong investigation into how it happened. The newspaper used AutoCad to re-create the club’s room the night of the fire and showed how people got stuck trying to exit the building, Bordeleau said.
The team discovered that the club was over capacity that night and had highly flammable polyurethane foam on the walls for soundproofing. When the band that was playing that night, Great White, set off pyrotechnics, the foam caught fire and the blaze spread quickly. The resulting story was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism in 2004.
“We were not going to give up on that,” Bordeleau said. “We did figure … out all of the mistakes that were made along the way. It was so hard to report and traumatic and emotional, but it was a really important story. I’m most proud of that.”
Bordeleau also taught journalism courses at the University of Rhode Island, Emerson College and Northeastern during that time. She would drive from Providence to Boston after work to teach night classes in ethics, editing and design. Despite the demand, Bordeleau loved being in the classroom.
“I would teach a three-and-a-half hour class and get home at midnight,” she said. “Sometimes I would be like ‘What am I doing?’ But you get to the classroom, and those students, they just light you up. … Just as I motivate them, they motivate me. Every single time, I would be all jazzed up (when I would leave).”
When she took an early retirement from the Journal in 2015, Bordeleau pivoted to teaching, accepting a position teaching at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University. She eventually became the school’s director of communications, where, inspired by the co-op program at Northeastern, she helped expand the internship program and pushed for more paid internships.
Last fall, Bordeleau returned to her native New England to be closer to her family and serve as executive editor of The New Bedford Light, a nonprofit digital news startup founded in 2021. The Light covers New Bedford, Massachusetts, a coastal city south of Boston that’s home to one of the world’s largest fisheries.
“Covering that and uncovering things within that industry is interesting and a challenge,” Bordeleau said. “This is a great city to work in. There are a lot of things where there’s sand in the gears and there’s a lot of things that work well. It’s a great place to do journalism.”
New Bedford also has a large immigrant population, Bordeleau said, which has led to important stories. At least 15 immigrants from New Bedford have been detained and arrested, many of whom did not have criminal records, Bordeleau said. The Light recently covered a story about a Guatemalan man who was arrested after federal agents shattered his car windows.
The Light is the first robust news outlet in New Bedford in several years, which means Bordeleau and her team are writing about public officials not accustomed to working with reporters, a contrast from Bordeleau’s early days when there were often multiple papers in a community covering local officials.
“We’re asking very tough questions,” Bordeleau said. “The administration (is) not used to it. There’s a lot of tug of war with us and who we cover, because they’re just not used to being asked these really important, straightforward, serious questions.”
The existence of The New Bedford Light is bucking a national trend. Across the country, newspapers are closing and 55 million people live in an area with only one or no sources of news. But Bordeleau believes her newsroom is part of a new trend and a shifting of the future of news, one she hopes Northeastern journalism students will be a part of.
“It’s a really big challenge for us, but the good news is there’s now a light, no pun intended,” Bordeleau said. “Nonprofit news organizations are sprouting up everywhere. Communities are not putting up with having no news. They want to know what’s going on, so you have people who are social activists (and) retired journalists creating news organizations to cover their towns.
“Journalism has had its challenges, but I want to encourage journalism students and particularly Northeastern journalism students not to give up. They need to be there in order to protect democracy. Journalism still lives, it’s just morphing into something different and there’s room for journalism students to participate in that and make a difference.”