Ultimately, Feeney said, the fact that readers clearly cared about the feature was the deciding factor. The outlet still publishes the log each week, with some edits, such as not publishing suspect’s names, and, she said, it “continues to be popular.”

As longtime newspapers in Massachusetts and across the country continue to disappear, a new crop of online news sites are looking to win over audiences and reimagine how they share police log information. Some have continued the news industry’s tradition of publishing police logs to give people information about public safety, but limit what details they share. Others have decided not to post the logs in an attempt to move away from a reliance on unchallenged police accounts and avoid potentially contributing to a misperception about crime in their communities.

Across the nation, many outlets are refreshing their crime coverage in an effort to minimize its harmful or racist effects, a trend that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020. Many newsrooms, for example, have made changes to avoid reporting unsubstantiated information from police, naming people accused of minor crimes, and publishing mugshots.

“The rise of the internet has made our work have much more lasting consequences than it had before,” said Cheryl Thompson-Morton, director of the Black Media Initiative at the City University of New York’s journalism school, who also advises newsrooms on crime coverage. “We see these stories disproportionately affect people of color, but certainly not exclusively.”

The new outlets’ approaches come as fewer and fewer local newsrooms across the country are in business and able to report on local crime trends. About one-third of newspapers that were operating in the United States in 2005 are expected to shut down by the end of this year.

The police blotter, a digest that typically details the local department’s calls for service, arrests, and incidents, has been a staple of newspapers for generations.

The log is often a matter of public record, a justification that many outlets have used as a defense to continue publishing it, even as people’s names published online have become searchable forever on Google, heightening the consequences of minor arrests.

Some legacy newspapers, such as the Daily Item in Lynn and the Lowell Sun, continue to publish the logs with the names of those arrested for nonviolent crimes, including such offenses as shoplifting, driving on a suspended license, and drug possession.

But the new outlets, unencumbered by longstanding habits, have largely moved away from that practice.

Logs — with or without suspects’ names — remain popular with many local residents, who say they read them to stay informed about their communities.

“It’s certainly a good thing to be available,” said Ravneet Grewal, 40, a Lexington resident who occasionally reads police logs. “We should at least have the option to see what’s happening around town.”

Feeney of the Lexington Observer and Alice Waugh, the editor of the Lincoln Squirrel, both said they publish weekly logs but edit them first and get additional details from police. Both editors remove all names, races, and street numbers out of respect for people’s privacy. They also remove the mundane entries that make up most of the log, such as routine traffic stops.

“I usually err on the side of privacy,” Waugh said. “I don’t think most of what the police do is news.”

At the Lexington Observer, the logs begin with a brief disclaimer that the outlet “does not independently verify this information.”

Other outlets in Massachusetts have made the conscious decision not to publish logs, including Brookline.News, which launched last year.

“To me, it’s the equivalent of publishing a press release, which news outlets don’t do,” said Sam Mintz, editor of Brookline.News. “Of course we still cover crime and public safety. … But we do it in a way [that] takes more work and reflects what the audience wants.”

That includes publishing stories about more serious crimes, such as covering a Brookline police officer who is facing discipline after driving nearly 100 miles per hour and striking another car.

One of the perks of helping to lead a new local publication, Mintz said, is the ability to start fresh on something like the decision to publish police logs. It’s a departure from the Brookline TAB, the former Brookline weekly newspaper that was owned by Gannett that had published blotters.

For some, however, the logs offer levity. The Marblehead Current, for example, in April dubbed a case “Mulch Madness” after a resident called police to complain about a neighbor placing mulch in an area where the property line was the subject of a court case.

The Marblehead Current started up two years ago, after the Gannett-owned Marblehead Reporter shuttered. The Current continued the tradition of publishing police logs, but does not publish the names and addresses of suspects, though it includes arresting officers’ names.

“We knew there was an appetite for doing it,” said Kris Olson, the former editor of the Reporter who is now a consulting editor of the Current.

A Pew Research Center report in August found that the majority of Americans are not satisfied with local crime coverage — only one-third said they were extremely or very satisfied with it. A vast majority of people said they were interested in knowing what local officials are doing to address crime and broader patterns in crime, but less than one-fourth said that information was at least somewhat easy to find.

Kelly McBride, a senior vice president and media ethicist at the Poynter Institute, a Florida-based journalism nonprofit, has argued that news organizations should not republish police logs because they amplify the police’s point of view without independent reporting.

“Any unfiltered information from law enforcement has a bias to it,” McBride said. “That bias creates a lot of misinformation about crime.”

McBride said publishing logs without people’s names and addresses and adding the disclaimer is a better practice. But the logs themselves can still create a perception of distorted levels of crime in a community.

“Police notoriously are inaccurate,” she said.

Sean Kennedy, the interim chief of police in Lincoln, said there can generally be inaccuracies in police logs, which officers usually dash off on the fly. That’s why he values having an open dialogue with Waugh to give additional information and clarify any mistakes.

“I do like the fact that there’s that conversation,” he said. “It’s important that the public has access to the information that they certainly have a right to.”

Feeney and Waugh said the logs can be helpful in identifying crime trends. For example, both editors said that there have been multiple incidents of financial scams, leading them to publish information about how to identify and avoid them.

Eric Ballard Jr., 42, a Lexington resident who works in the pharmaceutical industry and reads logs in the Observer, said learning about bikes being stolen and other crimes helped crystallize for him that the affluent community wasn’t completely devoid of crime.

“I like to see what’s going on and it’s kept me a little bit more aware,” he said. “Like, ‘Kids, don’t forget to lock up your bikes!’”

But some residents acknowledged the blotters can’t provide a complete picture of public safety.

“It wouldn’t change what I thought about a town,” said Letha Prestbo, 52, a real estate agent who lives in Lexington.

Aidan Ryan can be reached at aidan.ryan@globe.com. Follow him @aidanfitzryan.