The Granite State News Collaborative began in 2018 with a group of local journalists who, lamenting the state of the news industry, decided to experiment: what if all these competing local outlets across New Hampshire, all struggling against growing hardships in the business, worked together?
GSNC got its first grant in the summer of that year. At the time, there weren’t as many collaboratives across the country, and this one was project-focused (they started with a deep dive into the state’s opioid epidemic). GSNC’s primary goal was to earn the trust of news outlets so they would join. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, they started hitting a stride and figured out how to work together across newsrooms, Plenda said.
Now, GSNC is no longer project-focused. Instead, it exists to “fill gaps in the local news ecosystem,” said Melanie Plenda, Executive Director of the GSNC.
Since 2020, the collaborative has cross-published more than 7,000 stories – an additional 35 stories per week for each outlet. Plenda equated this to an extra two very prolific reporters per outlet.
When outlets agree to share content, anything they produce in-house can be shared with other partners across the state and cross-published across platforms. Outlets have benefitted because they get more news to their communities. They can be more efficient in-house because they don’t exhaust their reporters to compete with other partnering outlets for the same story. Plenda said that readers across the state are getting both statewide and hyper-local stories thanks to GSNC.
GSNC’s impact on New Hampshire
Their collaborative stories have made a big impact in New Hampshire. One example was a months-long series called “Invisible Walls” which investigated the affordable housing crisis and exclusionary zoning practices in Manchester, New Hampshire – the state’s biggest, most diverse city. They brought in and funded a data reporter to work with participating outlets. Their findings disproved city officials’ claims that there was more affordable housing than existed. Within 24 hours of the first of those three stories being published, the mayor called to find out more about the data so they could apply it to rezoning policies, Plenda said.
GSNC has eased workflow for local newsrooms with shrinking staff and has spearheaded multiple innovative ways to cover news. For example, GSNC worked with New Hampshire Public Radio to bring the first Spanish-language news content on and for New Hampshire communities. GSNC also started its own civic documenters program that now works with three of its partnering outlets to train community members to cover local municipal meetings. Those documenters have gotten stories that otherwise would not have been covered, Plenda said.
Plenda said that thanks to GSNC, partners have co-reported multiple statewide elections – something that has never happened before in the state.
The collaborative boasts more than 20 news outlets, ranging from major operations with multiple properties; to small operations and college papers. (College papers are “full partners” with voting power on editorial choices made by the collaborative, Plenda added.) Her partners include Gannett-owned outlets, family-owned outlets, and public media. They also have contracts with their partners that, in Gannett’s case, have been reviewed by lawyers, she said.
Plenda or another GSNC freelancer sends two emails each day of the week to partners: one at 10 a.m. and the other at 5 p.m. alerting them to new available stories in a shared digital library.
As of 2024, Plenda is the sole full-time staffer of the organization. She has a freelance assistant editor who helps share content across platforms, and two other freelance editors who help with stories. The rest of the team is freelancers.
Plenda said that GSNC’s model works well because it is a centralized organization that can liaise and help break down years of competition ingrained in their industry.
“We would not have gotten as far as we have if we didn't take the time for them to trust each other and want to work together,” she said.
Plenda recommends that if trying to replicate her model or bring in the student component, to first work with other already-established professional collaboratives, then bring in colleges to the already-established group.
The value of collaborating with student media
The collaborative works with students and student media at the University of New Hampshire, Keene State University, Franklin Pierce University, New England College, and Plymouth State University.
The collaborative decided to bring on college newspapers for reasons that some might find obvious: student papers often produce good work that adds value to their selection of cross-publishing news, and students were incentivized to work with them because they could more easily network with prospective employers in the industry.
However, an even bigger benefit is that it can foster a more civically engaged population of younger residents.
“Young people are like leaving in droves,” Plenda said. “I believe it's because we don't make them feel like this is their home. … One way to make someone feel more connected to their community is through local news.”
Professionals benefit, too: Access to student content allows professionals to publish reporting with different, more diverse perspectives and ideas, Plenda said.
“We're all a little stymied about what young people think,” she said. “This is one way to expose the broader public to what young people are thinking, or … what is news to them.”
Sometimes, professional outlets co-report with student media via collaboration, such as with a recently created youth voter guide for New Hampshire readership. Student reporters in that project produced the stories, handled the social media promotion of those stories, and managed the project themselves. Plenda and another professional acted as mentor-editors to the 20 or so students, who produced about 35 stories for that project across New Hampshire.
“We weren't really telling them what we thought should be in there,” she said. “They were running the show.”
A few years ago, the collaborative worked with one student reporter from each of the five collaborating colleges to report on race and equity in higher education. Over about a semester, they produced and shared six investigative and data-driven stories.
Students aren’t only useful for covering a local parade or fire, but can also tackle community-wide issues such as abortion or affordable housing on campus, Plenda said.
“It would not surprise me if, in a few years, it [student reporting] was integral,” she said. “Colleges are usually a major part of any local coverage. So the fact that those students are right there, they're in the nitty gritty, they're in the day-to-day, they absolutely are getting stories that the local paper isn't necessarily able to get. … They're getting stories that wouldn't be told otherwise.”
Working with students is an essential part of the equation because, for news to survive, society has to foster interest in journalism when students are young so they can maintain a classroom-to-newsroom pipeline. The collaborative leaves room for experimentation, such as Plenda and her freelance editors mentoring recent graduates in unofficial apprenticeships where those recent graduates are getting paid and are trained while putting out real stories. GSNC can do that “hand-holding” for a green reporter fresh out of college that strapped local newsrooms cannot do; that way, the young reporter may be more ready for a professional outlet once hired, Plenda said.
Seventeen of the collaborative’s interns and freelancers have gone on to work in New Hampshire’s local outlets, Plenda said. These young freelance reporters benefit from a tiered pay structure in the collaborative: They are paid per story depending on the number of sources they use instead of the word count. That way, Plenda said, it reflects the amount of work that went into each story.
“We're not giving them sort of fluffy BS stories, they're working on the real deal,” she said. “But we also understand that they need coaching … and we have the luxury of being able to give them that.”
