This is New Hampshire: Exploring Diversity in the Granite State

By Nour Habib, Granite State News Collaborative Engagement Reporter

Good morning! The Granite State News Collaborative is more than 6 months into our race and equity project, and we want to thank you, our readers and community, for continuing to be the driving force behind our reporting.
I have highlighted many of the stories and series that our team and our partners have worked on in the last few months, but there is a lot more available than I've been able to share in this newsletter. I invite you to visit our project page, where you can find everything from a series on environmental justice or college diversity to our civic engagement project and a bilingual initiative highlighting Latino restaurant owners in our state.
Let us know your thoughts on our first few months of coverage! Email me at nour.habib@collaborativenh.org with any feedback or suggestions you have.

The Collaborative's newest stories look at police reform in the state.

Jenny Whidden writes about a commission studying how to create a single, independent entity that would receive police misconduct complaints. Members of the commission are divided on a recommendation regarding the investigatory powers of this entity.
A story from Paul Cuno-Booth explores Portsmouth's recent decision to have the city's police department start collecting data every time officers stop a civilian. Proponents of this policy say the data is needed to better understand the criminal justice system and its disproportionate effects on people of color. The decision comes after a proposal to require similar data collection by all police departments in New Hampshire failed in the State House earlier this year. Stakeholders say the Portsmouth policy could become a model for other cities.

Diversity in the 603

According to recent census data, New Hampshire is growing more diverse. One of the recent episodes of The State We're In, a joint production of New Hampshire PBS and the Granite State News Collaborative, explored this diversity through the lens of a new magazine and a new podcast that have launched in the state. Watch the episode below.

Partner work

Our partners, as always, continue to produce top-quality, important work. Here are some of the things they've worked on in the last few weeks:

• From NH Bar News: Teaching the Art of Civil Discourse Read this profile of a retired high school social studies teacher, who says civics education centers on helping shape better citizens, and is more important than ever in today’s heated political climate.

• From The Laconia Daily Sun: Court ruling brings critical services to young adult students with disabilities The New Hampshire Superior Court ruled this month that young adults with developmental disabilities can now receive home and community services while also receiving special education services at school. Until now, they had to choose between education services and the greater range of supports provided to disabled adults who are 21 and no longer in programs at school. “We are pleased that the Court recognized the harm that this long-standing and unlawful practice was having on young adults with disabilities,” a disability rights advocate said.

• From NHPR: Conversations about race can be messy and exhausting. That’s not stopping these artists. Fourteen artists from around the country, who have met regularly on Zoom over the last year and a half to have conversations around race, bring their "Truth Be Told" exhibit to Hopkinton. NHPR spoke to a couple of them about their group, which was the inspiration for their art.

• From Citizens Count: Should recall elections come to NH? “Recall” is a process to remove an elected official before his or her term ends. The recent attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has drawn national attention to the process. Now some state legislators want to bring recalls to New Hampshire.

We're still looking for teachers and classroom educators to join our private Facebook group, Teachers Off The Record. The group is a space for teachers to have candid conversations amongst themselves and with a few members of the media about the biggest issues facing New Hampshire classrooms.

The discussion will guide our Education and Equity series coverage, but no teacher will be quoted without their express permission. If you're a teacher who is interested in joining, please fill out this questionnaire.

If you have any questions, email nour.habib@collaborativenh.org.

Three Questions with Ernesto Burden

Since he was a kid, Ernesto Burden had an obsession for writing and an obsession for computers.

“Back when personal computers were just sort of coming out, I had a Commodore VIC 20,” Burden said. “And my cousin and I would exchange programs in BASIC programming language.”

After college, he spent a few years as a reporter and editor at different newspapers, before eventually getting his foot in the door of the digital world by building a website for a newspaper he was working at in New Jersey in the late 90s.

His two obsessions have served him well in his long publishing career. He is now the publisher and vice president of McLean Communications, which has various publications, including New Hampshire Magazine and the NH Business Review newspaper. Last month, they launched a new magazine, called 603 Diversity. The magazine is one of the Collaborative’s partners.

Below, Burden answers a few questions about his work and life in New England. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

1. How did the idea come about for 603 Diversity?

The idea came about last year when we were, like everybody else, watching what was happening in the country and the conversation that was going on. One of the things that I heard again and again, as we sat in conference calls and webinars and sessions about diversity, was the idea of representation.

It seemed that, being already in a publishing space and having two really good distribution channels, we had the opportunity to create a publication that sat in a sort of interesting intersection between culture, art, business and community.

We brought a lot of people from the community into this conversation very early on. And I think there was a general feeling that we could do something that would be a really positive way to tell the stories that weren't necessarily getting told.

2. What has been your experience as a person of color living in New Hampshire?
Honestly, for me it's been good. I have had very few instances of overt biases against me because of my name or because of perceived background.

But when I was a kid, it was different. I absolutely want to be clear, I love my home state of Vermont. I was born there, I grew up there. My father was from Peru, my mother was a Vermonter, and my mother raised us. So I did encounter racism and bullying as a kid. Kids are just mean to each other anyway. And if they have something else that they can say about you, if you're the only brown kid in the school, for example, they're going to point that out.

But I think even more challenging, for me personally, was just the challenge of not having anybody in my life who looked like me. And at the time, there weren't many Latinos on television, even. That sort of missing sense of connection did leave a gap. I never want to make it seem like I'm complaining about any experience I had. I have always been way luckier than I deserve. But it's one of the things that comes to mind when the word representation comes up.

3. Journalism is facing hard times right now. Tell me about your strategy for audience growth and reaching people where they are.

At McLean Communications, we do several different kinds of publications that all sort of require different strategic directions, and are all sort of facing different kinds of challenges in the industry. Obviously, all of publishing is facing the challenge of a fragmented audience and an audience that is wedded to their phones and distracted by social media and an unlimited amount of video content and entertainment and everything else.

As a specific example, we created a digital edition of New Hampshire Business Review and did a lot of testing around how we're delivering that, in terms of the email templates that would maximize people's experience with that digital edition. But then we also found a way to pull the ads out of that digital edition, digitize them, and put them into a directory and make sure that we were giving them exposure on the website.

Audience development is definitely one aspect of what newspapers and publishers in general have to figure out. But the other aspect, besides audience development, of course, is ad revenues. So that was one of the things we thought a lot about was this sort of hybrid model.

Thanks for reading! See you next time. -- Nour

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ABOUT THE GRANITE STATE NEWS COLLABORATIVE

The Granite State News Collaborative is a collective of about 20 local media, education and community partners working together to produce and share news stories on the issues that most impact our state. Together we can provide more information to more communities across New Hampshire than we could individually.