Beth Treffeisen
Beth Treffeisen connects day-to-day consumer life with the shifting landscape of local business, crime, and food culture for Boston.com. Her reporting tracks how store openings and closings, public safety incidents, and workplace trends affect specific neighborhoods, businesses, and families rather than staying at the level of abstract policy. She is a reporter for Boston.com, focusing on local news, crime, business, and food coverage across the New England region.
Restaurant openings and dining updates
Treffeisen’s food coverage centers on how new restaurants and changing menus fit into the broader local dining scene and the lives of diners. She writes roundups of new restaurant openings and dining updates that highlight a mix of independent concepts and larger groups, giving readers specific locations, opening dates, and what to expect on the menu.
Her story on a French-Canadian restaurant, Celine, opening in Fort Point shows her interest in the narrative behind a concept as well as the practical details of its launch.
She also follows the fortunes of familiar fast-casual names, covering developments such as Boloco’s last restaurant staying open despite earlier closure plans. That thread carries into lighter, highly shareable pieces such as her feature on a Groveland ice cream shop that goes viral for its scoop-tossing service style, treating a social media moment as a window into small-business personality and customer experience. Across these food stories, she combines service information - where to go, what is changing - with concise scene-setting that roots each business in its street-level context.
Store closings and retail shifts
A major strand of Treffeisen’s beat is documenting how retail and commercial spaces open, close, and change hands, and what that means for long-time tenants and customers.
She has reported on REI closing its longtime Boston store, detailing how a national brand’s decision reshapes a well-known local shopping destination. In her coverage of Frugal Fannie’s closing after 43 years in Westwood, she traces the end of a deeply rooted discount retailer and underscores how longevity and loyal followings collide with current market pressures.
Her reporting on three longtime tenants leaving or relocating after the sale of a prominent Allston commercial building by Alpha Management focuses on the practical fallout of a real estate transaction: independent shops and services being priced out and facing uncertain futures.
She extends that retail lens to national brands and new formats, explaining where Toys R Us is returning to standalone stores in Massachusetts and what that roll-out will look like for local shoppers. Coverage of Amazon’s planned drone deliveries in Massachusetts similarly treats emerging technology as a concrete change in how goods move through the region’s skies and streets. Together, these stories show a consistent interest in the intersection of commercial real estate, corporate strategy, and the everyday routines of residents.
Crime incidents and public safety reporting
Treffeisen regularly reports on crime and public safety incidents, with a focus on clear timelines, locations, and the immediate consequences for those involved. In her story on a Tesla driver who says a moped rider punched him through his car window before a group chased his vehicle in Dorchester, she reconstructs the sequence of events in detail and situates the confrontation within a specific street setting.
Her coverage of a man shot to death in a Hyde Park business presents key facts - time, place, and the status of the investigation - without sensational language, keeping attention on the victim and the community impact.
She takes a similar straightforward approach to a report on a 25-year-old man arrested after a string of alleged assaults in Winthrop, outlining how multiple incidents connect to a single arrest. In a piece on a Massachusetts family losing four members in a Dominican Republic fire, she shifts from street crime to a tragic international incident while maintaining a focus on the family’s experience and the local ties back home.
Across these stories her crime reporting emphasizes verified information, geography, and human stakes, often returning to how public safety events ripple through workplaces, businesses, and neighborhoods.
Business, jobs, and wealth stories
Treffeisen’s business coverage often explores how large-scale economic forces manifest in specific companies, jobs, and fortunes.
Her story on Massachusetts billionaires on Forbes’s list of the 400 richest Americans links national wealth rankings to regional business figures, showing which industries and names dominate the top tier. In reporting on a biopharma sector rebound where jobs have not yet returned, she explains how investment and corporate recovery can diverge from hiring and worker experience.
Her article on job seekers in Boston facing mostly in-person roles examines the labor market from the perspective of those navigating changing expectations around remote work, hybrid arrangements, and commuting. Taken together, these pieces frame business coverage as something that touches storefronts, labs, offices, and households, not just corporate earnings reports. Beyond Boston.com, Treffeisen has reported for a range of outlets, including The Boston Globe’s business and metro sections, Crain’s New York Business, Boston Business Journal, USA Today, Edible Cape Cod, the New York Times, and NBC News, contributing features that extend her focus on local economies and communities to wider audiences.
That background informs a style grounded in specific places and people, whether she is writing about a viral ice cream shop, a shuttered retailer, or the future of work.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.