NH newspapers to train 'Civic Documenters' to cover local government meetings

Two New Hampshire newspapers are launching a pilot program to train people to help gather information at local government events and meetings. It’s part of an effort to boost community participation and government accountability as newsrooms face tight budgets and overstretched reporters in recent years.

The Keene Sentinel and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript, which cover the southwestern regions of the state, plan to partner with community members who will attend government meetings and then assist local journalists. These “Civic Documenters” will not publish articles in the newspapers. Instead, they will record municipal meetings and take detailed notes, which will help inform future news stories.

“We think it will help from an accountability standpoint that we will be able to keep tabs on municipal operations that we are not able to now,” said Cecily Weisburgh, co-executive editor of the Sentinel. “It's always been difficult to try and be everywhere all at once, but it is made more difficult by all of the different demands on the newsroom’s staff time.”

Weisburgh said assigning a reporter to attend every select, zoning and planning board meeting in the paper's coverage area isn’t feasible.

The local CivDoc initiative is inspired but not directly affiliated with the Documenters project, first launched in 2018, that has trained citizen documenters in a handful of cities across the country, including Detroit, Chicago and Atlanta.

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Participants in the pilot project in New Hampshire will receive five weeks of training on the functions of local government, as well as open meeting and public record laws. Documenters will cover no more than two meetings per month, and will receive a $50 per meeting stipend.

The project is a collaboration between the Granite State News Collaborative, the Nackey S. Loeb School of Communications and the New England First Amendment Coalition. (NHPR is a member of the Granite State News Collaborative but is not directly affiliated with the CivDoc project.)

If the model proves successful, organizers say it could be expanded to other news outlets in New Hampshire, including in the Lakes Region and in Nashua.

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These articles are being shared by partners in The Granite State News Collaborative. For more information visit collaborativenh.org.