Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

I Wrote Down the Rules. Now Hold Me to Them.

Granite State Report now runs under a written constitution and a one-page mission statement: eighteen articles, a signature, and a promise that none of it changes quietly.

A newsroom that spends its days asking public bodies to follow written rules ought to be able to produce its own. Starting today, Granite State Report can. It has a constitution, eighteen articles long, and a mission statement that fits on one page. Both are signed, dated, and posted on this site next to the Code of Ethics. Both carry a version log, and neither can be changed without an entry in it.

Full disclosure: This article is about Granite State Report, which I own and edit. I wrote both documents it describes. No lawyer and no outside editor reviewed them before adoption, and the constitution says so in its own version log.

This is not another policy page. GSR already has those. The Code of Ethics, in force since September 30, says how this newsroom reports. The Corrections Policy says what happens when it gets something wrong. How This Is Made says which tools build the page. The constitution sits above all of them. Where any of those pages conflicts with it, the constitution wins, and it says so in Article XVI.

It also reaches further than a policy can. It binds me, every contributor who ever writes under this name, every partner GSR signs with, and any company or nonprofit this outlet turns into later. Article I says a change of legal form does not change the constitution. Whatever GSR becomes, the rules come along.

Why a one-person newsroom needs a constitution

Three reasons.

The first is that a one-person newsroom keeps its rules in one head. I know what I will and will not do with a tip, a document, a sponsor’s check, or a request for comment that goes unanswered. You have no way to know that unless I write it down, and I have no way to be held to it unless you can read it. A rule that lives only in my judgment is not a rule. It is a mood.

The second is that GSR’s legal form is a sole proprietorship today, with a trade name registered with the Secretary of State under RSA 349. That may not last. Whether this outlet becomes a company, a nonprofit, or something in between, the people deciding that should be bound by something already in place, not free to write the rules after the fact. Article I settles it: any successor adopts the constitution as written, and no governing document of that successor may contradict it.

The third is money. GSR asks readers to support it and to sponsor records requests. Anyone who sends a dollar here should know what it buys and what it can never buy. Article XI says payment buys reporting work and nothing else: no conclusion, no preview, no veto. Article V goes further. Nobody can pay to be covered, and nobody can pay to be left out.

The record comes first

The longest article is the one about documents, because that is what GSR is. Reporting here starts from the paper the government makes in its ordinary business: statutes, filings, minutes, budgets, contracts, and the records that come back under the Right-to-Know Law. Officials get asked to explain those documents. Their explanation does not replace them.

Two rules in Article III are the ones I expect to be held to most often. The first is the negative-claim rule. When GSR looks for a record and does not find one, the story says it found no record. It never says the record does not exist, because I cannot know that. The second is the sent-letter rule. GSR never reports an action it has not taken. A records request that is drafted but not mailed is not described as sent, in a story, an editor’s note, or a social post. It is the kind of obvious that gets skipped on deadline, which is why it is written down.

Every accountability piece keeps its fact-check table, the one at the bottom of this article included. Every claim that carries weight gets a row, a status, and a named source. If a claim cannot be supported, it is labeled or cut.

Equal access, and no press tier

Article IV is about GSR’s own records requests, and it starts by giving something up. GSR files requests on the same footing as any other requester. A press credential buys no better place in line, and this outlet never claims one.

That distinction matters because GSR reports on how public bodies answer requests, and keeps a public Noncompliance List. Article IV commits this outlet to keep doing that, measured against the text of the statute and the dates on the record, and to keep every open matter walled off from every other matter and from unpublished stories. When the records are about me, as some have been, GSR reports on them the way it would on anyone else, with a disclosure like the one at the top of this article.

Independence, written as rules instead of a promise

Every outlet says it is independent. Article V says what that means here, in terms that can be checked. GSR is not owned, funded, or affiliated with any party, candidate, campaign, committee, government body, or corporate parent. GSR does not endorse candidates. If anyone in an editorial role here ever becomes a declared candidate or takes a paid or titled role with a campaign or party, that person steps out of every editorial decision touching that race, and GSR announces the step-down the day it happens.

Article V also covers the editor’s other businesses. Every outside business I own or work for is named on this site. A story that touches a customer of one of those businesses discloses it. None of them may pitch a sale to a public body that has an open GSR records dispute or an unpublished GSR investigation, and every customer goes on a public register within five business days of a sale. That rule existed before today as a policy. Now it is constitutional, which means loosening it requires 30 days of public notice.

The line GSR will not cross

Article VII draws the boundary around what GSR will do for money. GSR does journalism for the public. It does not do private investigation: no surveillance, no locating people, no background checks, no work for a party to a lawsuit, no private reports. A reader can commission reporting, and the result is published as journalism or declined. The outer edge of that rule is RSA 106-F, the state’s licensing law for private investigators, and GSR stays well inside it.

The same article is where the harm rules live. Private people get more protection than public officials. Minors and victims of sexual offenses and domestic abuse are not named without a clear public-interest reason and, wherever possible, consent. Before a document is posted, the information in it that serves no public purpose and could hurt someone comes out first: account numbers, medical details, the home addresses of private people.

Corrections stay, and they are never behind a wall

Article IX restates the four-part correction that GSR has used since its Corrections Policy went up: what the article said, what is true, what changed, and the date and time of the fix. It runs at the top of the piece and stays there. It goes out on every channel that carried the original. One line is new. Corrections and editor’s notes are never placed behind a payment or sign-up wall. Whatever else sits behind a subscription here, the admission that something was wrong never will.

What readers get, and what they do not

Article X is short. GSR writes in plain English for a general New Hampshire reader. Readers can comment, send tips, submit documents, and challenge the work, and GSR never edits a reader’s words to change their meaning. GSR collects only the information it needs to deliver what a reader signed up for, uses it for nothing else, and does not sell it. Any price this site charges, and any rule about what sits behind a wall, is published in plain terms.

What readers do not get is a vote. The constitution does not create a board, a membership assembly, or a reader veto. Article XII puts final authority over everything GSR publishes on the editor, and puts every published error on the editor too. Article XVII lets anyone propose an amendment by email and promises every proposal an answer. That is as far as it goes, and I would rather be honest about that than pretend to a structure this newsroom does not have.

Tools, and who answers for them

GSR uses software in research and production, and How This Is Made names it. Article XIII puts the rule in one sentence: no tool is a source. Nothing a tool produces is published as fact until a person has checked it against the record, and the editor answers for every error regardless of how it got into the piece. The tooling is not a defense.

How it changes, and how it cannot

I can amend the constitution. That is the honest answer for a sole proprietorship, and Article XVII says it. What I cannot do is amend it quietly. Every change gets a version number, a date, and a public changelog entry saying what changed and why. Earlier versions stay available. Any amendment that loosens the rules on the record, independence, fairness, or corrections is published 30 days before it takes effect, so there is time to object. No amendment can touch a correction, a disclosure, or an editor’s note already published.

Article XVI says what gives any of this force, since no court enforces it and under the First Amendment none could. The force is that it is written down where anyone can read it, and that a breach can be reported to the editor and answered in public. Where a rule can be read two ways, the reading that gives readers more and GSR less controls.

The mission, in six lines

The mission statement is shorter. It starts from six lines, the ones on the notebook page below: tell the truth, hold power accountable, give people a voice, build stronger communities, create opportunities for the next generation, and make a lasting difference. The statement turns each one into something that can fail. Tell the truth means every fact rests on a document or an on-record source GSR can show you. Hold power accountable means GSR files the requests and asks the decision-makers to answer before it publishes. Make a lasting difference means published stories stay published, corrections stay attached, and documents stay in the archive.

The one-sentence version is on the mission page and at the top of Article II: GSR gets New Hampshire’s public records, reads them, publishes them, and reports what they show about how public power is used, from the State House to the town office. It answers to readers, never to the people it covers.

Hear the documents

Both documents are posted in full, with narration, and both can be downloaded as a PDF. If you would rather listen than read, the players below carry the constitution and the mission statement end to end.

What I am asking

Read it. Then hold me to it. If a GSR story breaks one of these rules, write to the address at the bottom of every article, cite the article number, and expect an answer in public. If a rule is wrong, propose a better one; Article XVII says you will get a reply. If you think a one-person newsroom has no business writing a constitution, consider the alternative: a one-person newsroom with no rules you can read.

The documents are signed. The version logs are open. The rest is up to the record.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. The statutes cited were read in their published text at the New Hampshire General Court’s site on the date of publication; see the fact-check table. The two rows marked ATTRIBUTED rest on the editor’s own records. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.