— by Rob Gurwitt

In this era of contracting local news coverage, you don’t expect to see a state’s news offerings expand. But that’s what’s been happening in the Granite State.

First came the founding, in 2015, of InDepthNH, a nonprofit newsroom driven by former reporters for the Union Leader. Then, in 2018, a group of news outlets and educators launched the Granite State News Collaborative, with an eye toward sharing stories as well as fielding a team of freelancers who do in-depth reporting on issues of common interest. Two years ago, the national nonprofit States Newsroom arrived with the New Hampshire Bulletin. Now The Boston Globe has landed, with two reporters keeping up a stream of stories in the paper and in a daily email newsletter, and the resources of one of the country’s leading regional newspapers backing them up.

For its re-entry into New Hampshire (it once had a bureau in the state and even, in the late ‘80s, launched a thick New Hampshire Weekly section on Sundays) the Globe turned to two young reporters who were already part of the state’s press corps: Amanda Gokee, who grew up in Chittenden, VT and spent time in the Upper Valley while attending Dartmouth’s MALS program and then writing for VTDigger, spent nearly two years reporting on state government for New Hampshire Bulletin; Steven Porter worked in Maine for USA Today, moved on to that paper’s opinion section, and then launched Granite Memo, a newsletter and website focused on NH politics that quickly caught the eye of the state’s political class—and of the Globe. “They chose two reporters who know the state really well, and are good reporters,” says the Granite State News Collaborative’s Melanie Plenda.

The question, of course, is why the Globe looked toward New Hampshire in the first place. And the answer is that its owners—Linda and John Henry (Linda Henry has also been the paper’s CEO for the last three years)—see opportunity in the changing news landscape. The Globe first ventured into new territory in 2019, when it moved into Rhode Island after watching that state’s premier paper, the Providence Journal, retrench. The Globe’s approach was not to try to replicate the ProJo, as it’s known, with full coverage of sports, entertainment, restaurant reviews, and the like, but instead to fill in what it saw as important holes in the news.

“The shifts there created an opportunity for us to go in and fill some of the gaps we saw with investigative work, accountability work, and news features,” says Lylah Alphonse, who began steering the Globe’s Rhode Island effort in 2020, and now oversees its New Hampshire coverage as well. “We came into the Rhode Island market with the intent to provide the news people wanted that they weren’t getting. I like thinking of it as a microcosm: We’re bringing different points of view and priorities and ideas to a landscape that used to be robust and that we’re hoping to make robust again.”

So what is the Globe planning for the Granite State? “That,” says Alphonse. “We want to take a landscape that’s become less robust and make it more robust again and fill in some of those gaps before they get too large.” Or as Gokee explains it, “Early on we were down in Boston and met with Linda Henry, who said that the goal isn’t to put anyone out of business, it’s that this kind of expansion sharpens everybody. We’re able to fill things in, and a rising tide lifts all boats.”

To be sure, New Hampshire is more fortunate than many states, which collectively have lost thousands of papers over the past few decades. The Granite State’s anchor newspapers, in cities and towns alike, are alive and active, as are mainstay broadcast outlets like NHPR and WMUR. Still, most papers have had to downsize, sometimes by a lot. They’ve shed reporters and editors and, as a result, lost the breadth and depth of news coverage they were once able to provide. One answer they’ve found, the News Collaborative’s Melanie Plenda says, has been to work together: “I see our particular ecosystem moving toward more collaboration. I see more partners being really willing to work with each other, and that’s the way a rising tide lifts all boats.”

But the Globe can make its mark, too, says Alphonse: “I would say we’re not seeing a lot of coverage of indigenous communities, we’re seeing some environmental coverage but there’s a lot of room to explore, there’s some coverage of underserved communities but there could be more. There’s not a lot of accountability journalism, so we’re trying to do more of that.”

In fact, last year—even before Gokee and Porter began their work—the Globe’s investigative Spotlight team published an attention-getting two-part series on a former cardiothoracic surgeon at Catholic Medical Center in Manchester with a sky-high medical malpractice record—and the fact that CMC and New Hampshire’s medical board had said nothing. In a followup article, the Globe noted, “Doctors and hospitals are unlikely to volunteer a negative history, and the board does not make public what many health care consumers want to know, including hospital disciplinary actions, malpractice settlements, and criminal convictions, the Globe has found. That same information is available in many other states.” Alphonse says more Spotlight stories rooted in New Hampshire are possible.

The Globe now has seven people covering Rhode Island full time, and just two in New Hampshire, but in the relatively short time they’ve been at it, Gokee and Porter have conspicuously broadened coverage in the state: coming at statehouse stories with depth and nuance; looking for important but under-covered topics—as with Gokee’s story on people in NH suffering from ME/CFS (you may know it as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and how long Covid is bringing more attention from the medical community to the illness; and going deep on local stories in the news, as Porter did after the state backtracked on a Concord historical marker for labor organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and when a restaurateur in Franklin got into a highly public spat with the police chief over his department’s response to an online harassment campaign against her.

“It’s been quite a nice vibe with the other outlets in the state,” says Gokee. “It’s a collaborative group, everybody knows each other because they’re the people you run into over and over. My sense has been that we’ve gotten a positive response: People are hungry for more and for different news. We don’t want to replicate what is already being done well, so we are thinking about it and trying to approach it like, What’s the value we can bring? In New Hampshire a lot of the news of the day will get coverage, but not necessarily stories where you step back and put it in context: Here’s the bigger picture, here’s why you need to pay attention to this.”

One key piece of the Globe’s strategy—and of Gokee and Porter’s daily workload—is a weekday-morning newsletter called Morning Report. In a format honed by the Globe’s years in Rhode Island, where it has a similar newsletter, it’s a conversational look at a story Gokee or Porter has been working on, as well as a rundown of key stories around the state, both in the Globe and from other NH newsrooms. With its welcoming, personal tone, it’s already got 40,000 subscribers and has quickly become one of the cornerstones of the state’s daily news landscape.

The Globe’s ability to generate a field-tested newsletter from the get-go—and to market it effectively—is just one example of what it can mean to have a heavyweight news organization make a serious bid for readers in territory that isn’t its home base. There’s the investigative chops that the Spotlight team can bring to bear. And, Gokee noted recently in an interview with the Laconia Daily Sun, strategizing about how best to connect with readers, whoever and wherever they are, isn’t a luxury smaller news organizations tend to possess. “When you're going about your day-to-day reporting,” she said, “[you don’t] necessarily feel like, ‘Oh, I want to make beautiful Instagram posts to showcase the work I've done…’ Maybe you send off a quick tweet. But the fact that we have a team that's thinking about that really carefully — it's a privilege to work in that kind of an organization because it is important to meet readers where they're at.”

One other thing is worth noticing, too. Just as the Globe used its experience in Rhode Island to guide its move into New Hampshire, it’s almost certainly learning every day from its experience in the Granite State. “The Globe has an opportunity to continue to be a regional powerhouse and to serve readers throughout New England,” says Lylah Alphonse. “Right now we’re focused on getting New Hampshire established before we focus on where we want to go next. But is the Globe going to continue to expand and create products for people in other areas? Yes.”