One Word in New Hampshire’s Private Investigator Law Decides Who Counts as Press. Nobody Has Defined It.

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

RSA 106-F exempts anyone reporting for an “accredited” news outlet from a licensing scheme backed by a misdemeanor. The chapter never says what accredited means, and no one in New Hampshire issues the credential.

New Hampshire licenses private investigators. It does not license journalists. Between those two facts sits one word, and the state has never said what it means.

The chapter is RSA 106-F. It makes it a crime to run, without a license from the Commissioner of Safety, a business that collects information about people or organizations for a fee. Then it lists fifteen kinds of people the license does not reach: insurance adjusters, attorneys, accountants, bank employees, and, at paragraph VIII, anyone “reporting or providing information to an accredited news publication, media, or news outlet.” Read the whole chapter and you will not find a definition of accredited. Read the rest of New Hampshire law and you will not find a body that accredits the press.

That is the hole. Whether a reporter is inside the exemption depends on a credential that does not exist, which means it depends on the reading of whoever answers the phone at the State Police Permits and Licensing Unit on Hazen Drive. A licensing office should not be the arbiter of who is a journalist. On paper, in New Hampshire, it is.

What the statute does

The definition is broad on purpose. A “private investigative agency” is any business that, for a fee, collects information on the identity, character, reputation, conduct, background, movements, whereabouts, affiliations, or transactions of any other person, business, or organization, “for a private rather than a public interest.” Advertising in New Hampshire counts as doing business. Operating without a license is a misdemeanor for an individual and a felony for a company.

The license is not a formality. An applicant needs four years of full-time experience in law enforcement, corporate security, insurance investigation, or a licensed agency, or a criminal-justice degree plus two years of investigative work. The agency posts a surety bond of at least $50,000. Applications go in person to Concord. A reporter with ten years of bylines and no badge does not qualify, and the chapter offers no path that would let one qualify on the strength of the reporting.

For a newsroom, the definition ought to do the work by itself. Reporting for publication is the public interest by definition. A story published for everyone is not a report sold to one client, and the Unit should not need to construe a word to see the difference. But the legislature did not leave it there.

Where the word came from

In 2019 the General Court rewrote the chapter from top to bottom. The current text carries a single source line, 2019, 324:1, effective July 1, 2019, and the exclusions section that came with it runs to fifteen paragraphs. The word is older than the rewrite. Before 2010 the chapter’s exclusions section, then RSA 106-F:2, did not mention the press. Chapter 292 of the Laws of 2010, House Bill 651-FN, approved July 13, 2010 and effective January 1, 2011, rewrote that section and added new paragraphs, among them firefighters working public events, crash-reconstruction specialists, and, at paragraph VIII, “persons engaged in reporting or providing information to an accredited news publication, media, or news outlet.” Those are the words the chapter carries today. The 2019 rewrite moved the paragraph to RSA 106-F:4, VIII and changed nothing in it.

So someone in 2010 decided reporters needed a carve-out, which is itself an admission that the definition might reach them. And whoever wrote the carve-out reached for a word that has no meaning anywhere else in New Hampshire law. No agency accredits news outlets. No statute defines an accredited publication. The legislature borrowed a term from a world of press badges and wire-service credentials and dropped it into a licensing statute enforced by the State Police, without saying who hands the badge out.

Three ways to read it

There are three readings, and only one of them is safe for the press.

The first is that “accredited” is surplus. Everyone who reports for publication is outside the chapter because publication is a public interest, and paragraph VIII restates that for the avoidance of doubt. Under this reading the word does nothing. That is the reading GSR believes is correct, and it is the reading the Unit has never put in writing.

The second is that “accredited” means recognized: a daily with a masthead and a press association membership, a television station with a license, an outlet a licensing official has heard of. Under this reading an independent digital newsroom, a freelancer selling stories to three outlets, or a resident with a camera at a select board meeting is inside the definition the moment money changes hands, and outside it only if someone in Concord decides the outlet is real. That is a credential test with no credential, administered by the police.

The third is that “accredited” is a placeholder the legislature meant to fill in later with a definition or a rule. Fifteen years on, it has not.

The same chapter uses the word properly, once

Turn one section forward, to the qualifications for a license. An applicant can qualify with a degree in criminal justice or fire service “from an accredited college or university.” There the word carries weight. The U.S. Department of Education recognizes the bodies that accredit colleges, New England’s is the New England Commission of Higher Education, and its member list is public. A licensing officer handed that phrase can check it in a minute.

One section back, the same word attached to a news outlet points at nothing. Same chapter, same legislature. Whoever drafted this knew what accreditation means when a real accreditor exists. They used the word anyway where none does.

The rest of New Hampshire government already knows how to identify the press without a badge, and it does it by function. The Judicial Branch registers news organizations and individuals to record in its courtrooms, and it wrote its test down: established organizations or individuals that “regularly gather, report, edit, broadcast and publish news” or matters of public interest, in print or online, including internet outlets that regularly update, and not personal blogs. Its registered list runs from the Associated Press and the Concord Monitor to Free Keene, Granite Grok, and a one-town news site in Berlin. The Right-to-Know Law gives every citizen the same right to inspect and copy governmental records and never asks who you work for. And in 2010 the state Supreme Court held, in a case about a mortgage-industry website, that a site doing the informative work of the press is the press for purposes of the reporter’s privilege. Function, not credential. RSA 106-F is the one place the state went the other way.

Who this touches

Start with the obvious. Any reporter who takes money for reporting is, in the words of the definition, collecting information “for a fee.” What keeps that reporter out of the chapter is the phrase “private rather than a public interest” and, if that fails, paragraph VIII. The first phrase protects anyone who publishes. The second protects anyone the Unit calls accredited. A newsroom that publishes everything it produces should never need the second protection. But the second protection exists, and its existence invites the question.

Then the less obvious. New Hampshire’s press is thinner than it was a decade ago, and the people filling the gap do not look like the newsrooms of 2019. Independent digital outlets run by one or two people. Freelancers paid by the story. Reader-funded reporting, where a resident pays an outlet to dig into a town contract and the findings run for everyone. Nonprofit newsrooms whose funders are named in the piece. None of these carries a credential, because there is no credential to carry. Each one takes money to collect information. Each one is exactly the kind of operation an undefined word puts at the mercy of a licensing office.

The chapter also says out loud what kind of work it thinks it is regulating. A licensed investigator does not have to reveal the subject, nature, or substance of an investigation to anyone, short of a court order, if disclosure would harm the interests of the client who paid for it. Confidentiality is not a perk in this statute. It is a duty the license carries. A newsroom’s duty runs the other way, and the day GSR keeps findings from the public is the day it has stopped being a newsroom.

The line between journalism and private investigation is real, and it is not hard to state. If the answer publishes, it is journalism. If the answer goes to one client and stays there, it is investigation, and New Hampshire is entitled to license it. A reporter who hands a private dossier to a paying client has crossed the line whatever the masthead says. A reporter who publishes the dossier for the whole town has not, whatever the Unit thinks of the masthead. The statute draws that line in paragraph XI. Paragraph VIII muddies it.

What the Department can do this month

It does not take a bill. The Commissioner of Safety has rulemaking authority over the chapter under RSA 106-F:11 and RSA 541-A. A rule, or even a posted interpretation, could say two things in two sentences: reporting for publication is outside the chapter, and an accredited news outlet is one that meets the Judicial Branch’s own definition of news media. That is the function test the courts already apply, and the one the Supreme Court has used since 2010. It would cost the Department nothing and would take the police out of the business of deciding who is a journalist.

The advisory board the chapter creates under RSA 106-F:15 exists to review licensing issues. It could take the question up in a public meeting and put its answer in the minutes.

And the General Court can fix its own sentence. Strike “accredited,” or define “news outlet” the way the courts do. One line, before the 2027 session opens in January. In 2010 the legislature took a chapter that never mentioned the press and gave it a word that could be used against the press, and in 2019 it carried the word over unchanged. The legislature that wrote it can un-write it.

The question on the table

Nobody at the Department of Safety has, to GSR’s knowledge, ever told a reporter to get a private investigator’s license. That is not the point. The point is that the statute would let them, that the trigger is a word no one has defined, and that the people most exposed are the ones with the fewest resources to argue. A weekly with a lawyer on retainer can afford the question. A one-person outlet in Northfield cannot.

The Unit can answer it in a paragraph. The legislature can fix it in a line. Until one of them does, every reporter in New Hampshire who takes a dollar for a story works under a word nobody will define. GSR will publish whatever the Department says about it, and the silence if it says nothing.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Statutory citations were checked against the text posted by the New Hampshire General Court as of September 16, 2026; see the fact-check table. The pre-2019 chapter text is taken from the NH League of Investigators’ posting of the former statute and the 2010 chaptered law; the former “Exemptions” section could not be retrieved and is noted as such. The history of the press carve-out was corrected on September 22, 2026; see the correction note at the top. The disclosure above states the editor’s interest. Nothing here is legal advice. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed.