By Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, Laconia Daily Sun

Michael Mortensen is a veteran journalist who has covered the Lakes Region for decades. He has filled just about every role possible within a newsroom. Most recently, he’s been the “courts and cops” reporter for The Laconia Daily Sun.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Adam Drapcho: Mike, could you explain what it means to work the courts and cops beat? What does that mean for you and how you spend your workday? How do potential stories come your way? How do you and your editors decide which are worthy of your time, and how do you go about researching them? 

Michael Mortensen: The main source of information that I start with is usually information that is available through police logs and court dockets. From that you can get an idea of what has been happening, and very quickly you can tell which of the events or the cases are going to be interesting or really important. Those are the ones that I would focus on. When you have that basic information, then in the case of the court, you look and see what documents may have been filed in court. Then you also will talk with the attorneys that are involved, and sometimes the parties themselves that are the subject of the case. I covered both civil cases and criminal ones with the police.

You have some basic information that you get from the log and then you talk with the police chief or some other spokesman in the department to get more information and more detail. Once I've been able to get some of that basic information together, then I go back to the editors and say,this is what the story is, this is the information we have, and then the editors decide on how they want to use that story in the next day's paper. What other angles do they think that I as the reporter need to check out before I actually start doing the writing? Every once in a while I stumble onto a story, but most of the time when I find the stories that we're going to be writing about, it's just going through a routine on a regular basis and keeping tabs on what's happening in either a police department or in a courthouse. 

Adam Drapcho: Could you explain how the Sapry and Murray cases unfolded, beginning with the first clue you got that there might be a circumstance here worth investigating? 

Michael Mortensen: With the Sapry case, we knew that there was an untimely death. We didn't know the circumstances, but we knew that there was somebody who had been found in their apartment, and that that person was dead. The next major event that happened with that was the police about two or three days later named Mr. Sapry as a person of interest in the case, and they began to do aerial surveillance in an effort to try and locate him. They even put out robocalls to people who had landlines in the Laconia phone exchange to basically lock down and stay in their homes because they were unsure as to his whereabouts. Obviously at that point we began to work the story. One of the things was to figure out, where did he live? We were able to determine the house where he resided and talked to neighbors, ask what they knew about him. It was an effort to talk to neighbors of the apartment complex where the victim was found. About a week after the victim was killed, Mr. Sapry was taken into custody, and then the following week he was charged.

Adam Drapcho: While you've been trying to keep your tabs on the Sapry trial, we had another case developed with John Murray in West Alton. Can you describe how that went, and how that story came about? 

Michael Mortensen: Mr. Murray was arrested, and when we found out about his arrest by going to the courthouse, we were able to obtain an affidavit. You'll find in many criminal cases where the police or a prosecutor will lay out the information they have that they believe gives them probable cause to arrest somebody and to charge them. In this particular case, this affidavit spelled out in rather explicit detail the allegations against Mr. Murray of how he allegedly had sexually assaulted teenage employees who worked at the marina, where he was the manager. Subsequently, he was indicted. All this time he has been held in the Bena County Jail, and now it's uncertain when he's going to come to trial. He was charged for violating a federal law with regard to child pornography for some of the images that he allegedly had these youngsters provide him of themselves. Now the attorneys are trying to get a better idea of how the federal case and the state's case are going to work before they actually bring him to trial. It appears that he was scheduled to go on trial this month, but now it looks like it'll be sometime next spring. 

Adam Drapcho: We've had some high profile court cases in this market before, but it strikes me that this is an unusual circumstance where there's two that seem to be occurring at the same time. What is it like for you to try and present what's happening from a factual and straightforward point of view, and yet also make it readable and understandable as opposed to a mechanical story about how the justice system is going about its work? 

Michael Mortenson: When I approach any story, I always want to ask myself the question, why should the reader care? Why should you care about this particular case? In both of these instances, both men have been charged, and I must stress they are innocent until they're proven guilty. They have been charged with very serious crimes, and it's important to let readers know how the system works and how the various people involved in it deal with these situations when they come up. How do the police and the prosecutors proceed in preparing and presenting a case of this magnitude? If you were to talk to lawyers, they would say that every case is important, but there's a lot that rides on these cases because among other things, there's more than the average amount of public interest, but also there's a lot that's hanging over the head of the accused.

If the accused is found guilty, you're talking about someone who's going to be spending a lot of time in prison. Perhaps in the case of Mr. Sapry, it could be the rest of his life. Because of the consequences of the outcome, I think it's important to provide people with information on how these types of cases are handled, particularly ones that are serious. If people don't get to understand these things, whether it's by reading about them in a paper or hearing about them on radio or a television broadcast, it's very easy then for the public to have an inaccurate or distorted notion of how the criminal justice system works.It's important from the standpoint of public education and public information so people understand how their society functions and how these services are there to try and bring justice where there's a question of the allegations that something very wrong took place. How are people held to account and how do you vet the accusations to determine whether or not they're well founded? 

I've always worked in a small town or small city environment. Unlike with reporters from larger news organizations, when I start covering something at the beginning, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to be covering it step by step, and that the paper is going to be reporting on it as those steps take place rather than when reporters in larger news organizations might get sent out, say to the Sapry case, but they might be there for one day and then they don't come back again for several months. With the kind of news organization that they work for, that's how they'll handle it. But we handle it each step along the way. I think that can help to get the reader to have a better understanding of how the system is working. 

Adam Drapcho: Courts and cops is an old school beat in that it would be common in legacy newspapers.When we think of more progressive newsrooms, it tends to be more along the lines of what you described earlier, where a reporter might be sent out for a day or two, but we wouldn't see one reporter be dedicated to the courts and cops beat. Would you make the argument that it's worth keeping a specific reporter assigned to this beat? 

Michael Mortensen: Yes, because I think it's a way of making sure that the reader or the viewer or the listener gets to hear the complete story. I think it's very hard to accomplish that if you don't have somebody who is focusing on that, who knows the processes, and knows how to keep abreast of developments. Otherwise, you're relying solely on a reader or a viewer or a listener who calls up the paper or the broadcaster with tips rather than having a reporter who's making regular checks, whether it's what the police are doing or what's happening through the courts. A lot of it can seem monotonous, and sometimes you can go through the process on a number of days and not come up with anything that's really that important or that compelling. That's also how you make sure that you keep tabs with the things that are. It's just another form of local reporting, and if you don't have good local reporting, then it's very difficult for any citizen to have an idea of what's happening in their community. 

Julie Hart: What else have you seen change about journalism in this area or in New Hampshire throughout the course of your career? 

Michael Mortenson: There is a great deal of cynicism among some people about the work that journalists do. I haven't had too many people who've confronted me and accuse me of being part of fake news or that kind of rhetoric, but it's obviously out there and I do catch it on the rebound from time to time. I've never let it discourage me from doing my job, and I still get a great deal of self-satisfaction out of doing it but I think it's probably one of the biggest changes. 

The other I would say is that the landscape of news gathering has changed. Every news gathering organization has gone through challenges that have affected how they go about gathering news. Newspapers more often than not today have much smaller news staffs than they had 15 or 20 years ago. A lot of that simply has to do with the economics of the businesses, particularly when it comes to local news coverage. I wasn't working at a newspaper at the time, but I was interested in news coverage, and I was a senior in high school. I can remember for example, when Kennedy was assassinated, just about every single daily newspaper, particularly in the eastern part of the United States, put out an extra edition when that happened, including the paper in Laconia. When 9/11 happened, no newspaper put out an extra.

What that illustrates is how people were getting news. It wasn't that people weren't interested, but where they were going for their information. On 9/11, they were going to television and were glued to their TV sets. It's part of a bigger picture of how news coverage, particularly newspapers, has changed. I knew someone who said, you never realize there's a revolution going on when you're in the middle of it. I think that's probably true with regard to newspapers. We've been going through a tremendous sea of change in the way we gather news and the way we present the news. Unless you go out there and get the information right about it, then there's no other way that the public can be informed and have some reasonable expectation that they're being informed by people who are going about their jobs with a certain amount of discipline and integrity.

 This article is part of The Granite Beat, a project by The Laconia Daily Sun and The Granite State News Collaborative, of which Laconia is a partner. Each week Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, will explore with local reporters how they got some of the most impactful stories in our state and why they matter. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.