By NANCY WEST, InDepthNH.org
MANCHESTER – New Hampshire is in the middle of a news crisis with many newspapers and online publishers struggling financially to run the kind of news operation they want for their subscribers and InDepthNH.org is doing our part as a nonprofit to help.
No wonder, the numbers from the Department of Employment Security tell part of the story that in 2001, New Hampshire newspapers employed 2,201 people in New Hampshire. Those numbers have continued to drop every year and had reached only 526 newspaper employees by 2023.
While those figures don’t represent the people who work at relatively newer online news outlets, they tell a pretty scary tale.
Recognizing the changing news landscape in New Hampshire, Fred Kocher invited me and Melanie Plenda of the Granite State News Collaborative to be his guests on the NH Business segment on WMUR that will air Sunday morning, Jan. 19, at 8:40 a.m. and 9:40 a.m. It will run again Tuesday at noon in the second half-hour of an hour newscast. It will also be posted all next week at WMUR.com.
It was an honor to be invited as a guest on the Fred Kocher’s NH Business segment because it is so well-known and respected in New Hampshire. Kocher has been in the news business about as long as I have so it was fun to be interviewed by a kindred spirit who has decades of New Hampshire experience.
Kocher, who received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Business and Industry Association of New Hampshire in 2022 among many honors over the years, focused on the changing landscape of news in New Hampshire.
I mentioned we are offering all of InDepthNH.org’s original reporting for free to all of the newspapers and news outlets as long as the publishers pick up the stories using the template that is attached at the end of every story and credit InDepthNH.org and the reporter.
We also offer to email our reporting to publishers as soon as the stories are finished for a nominal fee that simplifies the process. It’s part of our mission to help save local news and we take that very seriously.
So does Fred Kocher. Great interview. Thanks Fred.
