A conversation with the “Granite Geek” about the changing landscape of local news

By Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, Laconia Daily Sun

Listen to the full interview on The Granite Beat podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

Our modern world advances at an ever-increasing pace and the news industry is not immune from the impacts. How do these shifts in technology and public sentiment change the media landscape? How can we keep up? We speak with David Brooks, the “Granite Geek” and columnist for the Concord Monitor, about the obstacles and opportunities of the union between tech media.

This transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Adam Drapcho: David, could you describe for us the path that took you to journalism? What attracted you to the industry and how'd you break in?

David Brooks: What attracted me to the industry was the comics page of the newspaper as a kid. I think that's fairly common, at least from my age group. I like newspapers and of course the Vietnam War was going on, so there was always stuff in the news. My dad was in the military, so I had an interest in newspapers. Growing up I got my bachelor's degree in mathematics, another interest, but there's not much you can do with a bachelor's degree in mathematics. You really need advanced degrees, which was over my head. I fell back on newspapers as a default. Actually, my first job in a newspaper was typesetting that I just took to make some money and to see what a newspaper's like.

While I found out what I wanted to do in life, it was a small daily, and when they had an opening for a reporter I was able to weasel my way into the newsroom. That's how I got started. That was 43 years ago and I've worked for daily newspapers ever since Tennessee. I grew up in Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia, and then up in New Hampshire. I've been in New Hampshire for 30 some odd years. I was 28 years at the Nashua Telegraph, and I've been seven years now at the Concord Monitor, almost always as a general assignment reporter with an emphasis on technology, science, and business.

Adam Drapcho: How do you go about deciding what to write about for your columns?

David Brooks: I write about what interests me. I have to feel that it has some impact or some interest to the outside world, but there are things I write about that are only of interest to me; the classic example being culverts. I've written about culverts a lot. Culverts are awesome. In the process of writing about them, I think I've made some readers understand that they're important. They're a signifier of climate change's effect on our infrastructure, because when you get extreme rains, they wash out a culvert and all of a sudden you can't drive down that road anymore. That thing you've never noticed before is suddenly very important. They're small enough that they can be understood as compared to big sweeping infrastructure bills or something. [I did a recent] column about a couple of nonprofit avalanche groups in the Mount Washington Valley, which is really boring. Who cares about organizations joining together? I used it as an excuse to talk about how climate change is making avalanche forecasting more difficult and what that might mean for people like me who hike. I had the luxury of being driven largely by my own personal interest.

Adam Drapcho: Many writers who have been in the game for many years have developed a relationship of sorts with their readers. But you've taken it a step further by hosting monthly Science cafe meetings. Could you tell us how and when that started, what that's like, and how it has fostered a connection between you and your audience?

David Brooks: 11 years ago or something, I was approached by a couple of people who wanted to start a science cafe that's a monthly discussion in a bar or a restaurant about some topic, sort of like a book group except it's about sciencey stuff. They exist in many parts of the world, and there's a number of them around the US. They basically wanted me to get involved partly because I'd give them free publicity in the newspaper. I said that was a great idea. I'd been looking for something like that.

Our kids were growing up and leaving the house, and my wife and I were looking for stuff to do, and that was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. We started it down in Nashua. It got popular enough that when I moved to the Monitor, I started it up here in Concord and other people took it over in Nashua as well. We had two of them going. Since then, the Sea Science Museum in Manchester has started one, they're still going strong. In downtown, one of the bars in Manchester. There's been one out in the Seacoast that has started and stopped. There's one in Keene, you choose a topic, you find a couple people to answer questions about it, and people come into the bar of the restaurant and ask them questions for a couple hours. It's very casual. My role was always as moderator and publicist. I met people who were already readers of the column or of the newspaper or who became readers of the column on the newspaper.

Adam Drapcho: How have you seen the newspaper landscape change, and do you feel that the role of columnist has changed with it?

David Brooks: It's declined precipitously since I started. I was of the generation that came in right after Watergate that was all excited about newspapers, and they were doing everything. The local news really peaked about the millennium in terms of a business, staffing, and the reach and importance. The newsroom in the New Hampshire State House used to be packed. There wasn't enough room, people would fight over who got the desk, and now it's a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

There just aren't that many staffers. If you'd asked me this question six, seven years ago, I'd have said it's doomed. There isn't enough money to support local journalism in the old business ecosystem, which is advertising and subscriptions. Advertising is gone. It's all gone to Google and Facebook and Twitter and whatever, and there just isn't enough money in subscriptions to support what you and I think of as standard local journalism. However, in the last three or four years there's been a growth in non-traditional local journalism. I'm thinking of Report for America, which is a national nonprofit that pays roughly half the salary of a reporter and sticks them in local newsrooms. There's conditions and all that, and we have a couple of them right now.

It's increased the newsroom staff at the Monitor by a sizable extent. There's some nonprofits; New Hampshire Bulletin is a classic example that started up two or three years ago with a couple of very experienced journalists that has done great work and doesn't have a corporate overlord and doesn't sell ads. It's a different thing. Vermont has a couple of statewide nonprofits, Vermont Digger and Seven Days, that are pretty experienced, pretty established. I'm much more hopeful for that. Local journalism will continue, even though the private commercial model is not succeeding.

Adam Drapcho: We're at a time of great change in the local media landscape. You mentioned the development of these not-for-profit organizations and how they've changed the scene here. I'm wondering though, as someone who focuses a lot on technology, how do you see technology interacting with the way that we share news today? What's your forecast for how that might further develop in the future?

David Brooks: Well, since I've been so staggeringly incorrect for years about this, I'm not sure I do anymore. I think one of the things that has happened in the last couple years is that the general public has come to value the idea of local news a little more, even though they get mad at their local paper because it misspelled their kid's name in the sports section or something. I think there's somewhat of a groundswell of people who are interested in the idea of local news. Still, existing technology is not entirely friendly to that. I'm old enough that I was around when the internet started and one time I had five email addresses at The Telegraph, first guy with an email address at The Telegraph as part of the paper. We thought it was going to be awesome. We were going to make just as much money from ads and yet we were going to spend less on circulation and we were going to be rolling in it. That didn't work out too well.

The saying was you traded advertising dollars in print for advertising dimes on the website. That's been traded for advertising pennies on mobile. Phones are great for scrolling, are great for quick hits, are great for zipping through a whole lot of stuff fast. I don't think they're very good for actual journalism. Having said that, I didn't grow up with one. You ask a 20 year old who's never seen life without everybody having a phone, it may not be as much of an issue for them. I am unclear as to, if most people transition entirely to the equivalent of their phone and mobile devices, what local journalism will look like in that format. It can't just be social media of people sharing stuff. There has to be stuff to share and most of reporting is dull and time consuming, and nobody's going to do it unless you're paid to some extent. How that will fit into a TikTok world, you need to ask somebody with less gray hair than me.

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. This project is being shared with partners in The Granite State News Collaborative