A Black Lives Matter protest more accessible to those in the disabled community is being organized for next Friday in Portsmouth.
On this week’s episode of The Granite Beat we spoke with Amanda Gokee, a reporter with The Boston Globe. When The Globe decided to open a New Hampshire bureau, Amanda’s local credibility and experience at the New Hampshire Bulletin was exactly what they needed to shine a light on what’s happening in the Granite State for local, regional, and national audiences. In her new role she has written about everything from politics to health, education to climate, and breaking news to trans healthcare.
On this episode of The Granite Beat, Julie and Adam talk with sports journalist Joshua Spaulding. He’s worked 20 years as a sports editor for the Salmon Press, which publishes weekly newspapers throughout central and northern New Hampshire, and currently directs and produces sports coverage for 11 newspapers. Over the years he has chronicled the stories of promising young athletes, some of whom have risen to professional or even Olympic competition. If you played high school sports in the Lakes Region or Northern New Hampshire within the past two decades, it's almost guaranteed that Josh has published your name at least once.
In this episode of The Granite Beat, hosts Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart speak with Manchester Ink Link founder Carol Robidoux, a veteran journalist who left behind the legacy outlets to create her hyperlocal news website to supply residents with local, reliable, and community-driven stories in a central hub. They discuss some of her recent stories, such as the Harmony Montgomery case, the affordable housing crisis and community-centered reporting.
This week, The Granite Beat hosts Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart speak with Eric Rynston Lobel, an early-career journalist who already has an impressive breadth of experience. Since graduating from Northwestern he has written for Sports Illustrated as well as the Concord Monitor. They discussed how he chooses his stories, sought his view on where the industry is heading, and heard what advice he would give an aspiring journalist.
As financial pressures push news outlets to take a hard look at their payroll, alternative funding sources have come into play as a way to bolster reporting positions. At The Keene Sentinel, Olivia Belanger holds one of those positions. She leads the paper’s Health Lab, and she said the position doesn’t just add another position, it allows whoever holds that position to do a different kind of work.
According to studies cited by Lauren McKown at Report for America, which provides funding for reporters to tackle pressing issues and missing areas of local coverage: Just 17 percent of what’s in a local newspaper is local news – the rest is wire and national reports. Roughly 36,000 reporters were let go during COVID-19, and hardest hit were outlets in rural communities and communities of color.
At a time when information flows more freely than ever, the local news industry finds itself at a crossroads. The advertising and subscription model that held up the industry for so long has consistently been chipped away over the past two decades. The financial challenges have only accelerated over the past few years with the pandemic, and more recently with new pressures from inflation. Across the nation and here in New Hampshire, that’s meant far fewer reporters to dig into local and statewide issues. And in some communities, it’s meant no reporter or news publication at all.
