Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Commission an Investigation: Put Granite State Report to Work for $15

Pick the public body, the spending line, or the question that has been eating at you. GSR drafts the records request, tracks the deadline, and does the digging. Eighteen options, priced against real market data, starting at $15, plus a crowdfunded docket.

By Dexter Dow · Granite State Report · August 3, 2026

Starting today, Granite State Report takes commissions. For $15, I will pull the minutes and the paper trail of the public meeting you missed. For $40, I will draft, file, and track a Right-to-Know request aimed at any New Hampshire public body you choose. For more, I will read the budget, autopsy the contract, watch the meeting, check the claim, or run the whole investigation and either publish what I find or hand you a private research memo. Eighteen options sit on the menu below, and the prices were set the way GSR sets everything else: against documents. In this case, the going rates of every industry that sells anything close. You pick the subject. I do the work.

Here is why this exists. New Hampshire government runs on paper: budgets, contracts, emails, meeting minutes, legal bills, settlement agreements. RSA 91-A:4 gives every citizen the right to inspect and copy those records. No press pass, no lawyer, no stated reason. Most people never use that right, because using it costs the one thing they are short on: hours. Hours to write a request a records officer cannot wave off. Hours to count the five business days the agency gets to answer. Hours to read what comes back and spot what is missing.

I already spend those hours. Records work and document analysis are the spine of this outlet, the same machinery behind pieces like the Rundlett school-bonding investigation. What changes today is that the machinery takes passengers.

How it works

Email granitestatereport@gmail.com with COMMISSION in the subject line. Give me five sentences: who or what you want examined, what you want to know, why it matters, what you already have, and which option below fits. I answer within two business days with a yes, a no, or a counter-scope. Nothing is owed until you accept a scope in writing. Then an invoice goes out, and the clock starts when it is paid.

The menu

Records and documents

Answers

Document work

Watching

The big work

The community tier

Tips stay free, and always will. A commission buys scheduled, guaranteed attention. It does not buy the newsroom, and the tip line does not care about any of this.

What $40 looks like in practice

Say you want to know what your town paid its lawyers last year. You email me the town and the year. I draft a request for the legal-services line items, the invoices, and the engagement letters, cite the statute correctly, and file it. The five-business-day clock starts. If the town produces, you get the invoices with my read on what they show. If the town claims an exemption, the law makes it name the specific exemption in writing and explain how it applies to the withheld record, and you get that letter plus my read on whether the claim holds up. If the town goes silent, a follow-up goes out citing the deadline it just missed. Either way you end up holding paper, not a shrug.

How these prices were set

The numbers above did not come off a dartboard. Before setting a single price I did what this outlet does: pulled the documents, in this case the published rates of every market that sells anything adjacent. The receipts are in the fact check at the bottom, sources opened and read on August 2, 2026.

Start with the closest thing to a do-it-yourself comparison. MuckRock, the national records-request platform, charges $20 to file up to four requests. That buys filing infrastructure: the letter goes out, the responses come back, the archive is permanent. It is a good service, and it is not this one. Writing the request so an agency cannot wave it off is your job there. Reading what comes back is your job there. A GSR Records Run is the opposite product: the drafting, the statutory citations, the deadline chase, and the plain-English read are the whole point. The $40 is not for postage. It is for the part MuckRock leaves to you.

The entry tiers price against that same map. The $20 Records Letter is MuckRock inverted: they sell the filing without the drafting, and this sells the drafting without the filing. The $15 Minutes Pull and the $25 Quick Question sit below every professional rate on this page; each costs less than a quarter of a single average investigator hour and still ends with a document in your hands.

Now the professional end. Private investigators are the one private-sector trade that does commissioned digging for ordinary customers, and their prices are public. Thumbtack’s national marketplace data puts the average at $110 an hour, with common rates running $75 to $275 an hour, an average completed job costing $407, and firms routinely requiring $1,500 retainers before ongoing work begins. Hold the GSR menu against that. Every tier below the Full Investigation costs less than two hours of the average investigator’s time. The Full Investigation itself starts at a third of the standard retainer, and a records-driven public-accountability question is exactly the kind of work that trade does not sell.

Then there is what people already pay for news, which is the most honest constraint of all. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report found that 22 percent of Americans say they pay for online news at all. Across twenty countries the figure is 17 percent and has not moved in three years. A 57 percent majority of non-subscribers say they would pay nothing, and nearly half of American subscribers are not even paying full sticker price. The median American digital news subscription runs about $2.31 a week, roughly ten dollars a month, per the American Press Institute. Read those numbers the way I did: the subscription well is crowded and discounted to the floor.

So GSR is not selling a subscription. A commission is a product: one price, one deliverable, no auto-renew quietly billing your card in month nine. A $40 Records Run costs four months of a typical local paywall and hands you something a paywall never will: paper with your question’s answer on it. That is the bet, and it is aimed at the majority who will never subscribe to anything but might buy a thing.

Two more pricing facts, stated plainly. First, these are launch prices; if the docket overflows, they rise, and the increase gets announced on this page like everything else here. Second, agency fees are a separate line, and in New Hampshire they are usually zero. MuckRock’s own analysis found agencies charge a fee on roughly one in six American records requests, and the New Hampshire statute is friendlier than most: no charge to inspect, no charge for delivery without copying, copies at actual cost. Whatever the math, you approve any agency number before I pay a cent.

Published or private: pick a lane

Every Full Investigation runs in one of two lanes, chosen at scoping. Lane one is commissioned journalism: the findings publish on Granite State Report, whatever they show, with a disclosure line telling readers the piece was reader-funded. Lane two is private research: you get a memo, not a headline, which suits people who want answers before they want attention. Commissioners can stay unnamed in print, but never to me: I know who is paying for every piece, and lane-one articles tell readers a reader paid. One rule sits over both lanes and does not bend. I do not sell silence. No nondisclosure agreements on matters of public concern, and if commissioned research turns up something the public needs to know, GSR keeps the right to report it on its own dime.

The rules

Targets are public. Public bodies, public money, public officials acting in their public roles, and businesses on matters of genuine public concern. That is the beat, and the whole beat. The people-adjacent tiers sit behind the same gate: a Property Trace, a Court File Pull, and a Campaign Finance Check are on the menu because those deeds and dockets and filings are public records with public stakes, not because public records make private lives fair game. The registry of deeds is open to anyone; that does not make your neighbor’s mortgage my beat.

What I will not take. Your ex, your neighbor, your custody fight, a background check on a private person, a skip trace, or any private feud dressed up as public interest. A request built to harass someone gets declined at intake, no charge and no apology.

You buy the work, not the conclusion. If the records clear somebody, that is the finding. In lane one, it publishes as one.

No hired guns in a race. Candidates, campaigns, political committees, and sitting officials do not get to commission coverage of their rivals. If you hold or seek the office, the commission desk is closed to you on that subject; the tip line stays open, same as everyone’s. This is why the Campaign Finance Check carries its own restriction: it exists for voters, not for opposition shops.

Editorial control stays here. What runs, when it runs, and how it is framed are my calls. Commissioners get the work; they do not get the pen.

Agency and court fees pass through at cost. Since August 2024, New Hampshire agencies can bill up to a dollar per message on electronic-communication requests past the first 250, a charge the statute has agencies waive for qualifying public-interest requests, with news outlets like GSR staying eligible for the waiver. That waiver touches fees only; access under RSA 91-A is equal for every person. Court clerks charge for copies too. Whatever the source, you see the number and approve it before I pay it.

This is a newsroom, not a law firm. Commissioned work is journalism and research. It is not legal advice and it is not legal representation. When a matter needs a lawyer, I will say so plainly.

Questions you will ask

What if nothing comes back? You still get the product: the request as filed, the agency’s answer or its silence, the follow-up, and my read on what the response means. Sometimes the finding is that the town holds no such record, and that is a finding; sometimes the finding is a stonewall, and a documented stonewall is worth more than most answers. Findings are never refundable. Failure to deliver is: if I do not produce the scoped deliverable, you get your money back.

What if the agency drags past its own deadline? Then the product includes the chase. The tracking continues, you get told, the follow-up letter cites the statutory deadline the agency just missed, and if it comes to enforcement you will hold a clean paper trail built for exactly that.

Can I give one as a gift? Yes. Pay for the Records Run; the recipient picks the target. It is the best housewarming present in Belknap County.

How fast can you start? Granite State Report is a one-person newsroom. Slots are limited, first come, first scoped, and the two-business-day intake reply tells you where the docket stands. If it is full, you hear that at intake instead of watching a deadline slide.

Why charge at all

Because free journalism is not free; it is unpaid. Every records request GSR files eats hours that nothing currently pays for, and the standard funding models all cost you something worse. Advertising sells your attention. Paywalls lock the records behind the same kind of gate the agencies use. Commissions do neither: the reader who wants the digging funds it, and the findings stay free for everyone. The incentive points where journalism’s incentive should point, at the question instead of the traffic. If the model works, it pays for more reporting nobody commissioned. That is the whole business plan, printed in public, on purpose.

What the law gives you

RSA 91-A:4, I gives every citizen the right to inspect and copy governmental records held by public bodies and agencies. The response clock and the exemption requirement sit in paragraph IV. And when an agency stonewalls anyway, know the terrain: the state’s Right-to-Know Ombudsman seat has sat vacant since July 1, 2025, and the state’s own notice says filings get no action until it is filled. The working enforcement route is a petition in superior court. Every request I file is built with the paper trail a judge would want to see.

The first sentence of the Right-to-Know Law calls openness in public business essential to a democratic society. The records are already yours. Using them just got a menu. Pick your subject, email granitestatereport@gmail.com with COMMISSION in the subject line, and put this newsroom to work.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Statutory descriptions above are drawn from RSA 91-A as published by the New Hampshire General Court and from the Office of the Right to Know Ombudsman notice published by the New Hampshire Secretary of State. Market pricing figures are drawn from MuckRock, Thumbtack’s national cost data, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2024, and the American Press Institute; see the fact-check table. Pricing and terms are Granite State Report’s launch offer as of August 3, 2026 and may be updated with notice on this page. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.