How Granite State Report Is Made

Every outlet has a method. Most of them will not tell you what it is. Here is ours, in full, including the parts that are uncomfortable to publish.

I ask public agencies to explain how they reach their decisions. Several of them have told me, in writing, that the question is burdensome. It would be indefensible to press that question for a living and refuse to answer it about my own work. So this page describes exactly how a Granite State Report story gets made, what tools are involved, what a machine does, what a person does, and whose name is on the result.

This is a standing page. It is dated, it is versioned, and every change to it is logged at the bottom. If the method changes, this page changes first.

Who is accountable

One human being verifies every published claim and is accountable for it. That person is named in the byline. There is no arrangement under which an unnamed person, an automated system, or an outside party puts a sentence into a Granite State Report story without a named editor confirming it and taking responsibility for it.

If something on this site is wrong, the person in the byline got it wrong. Not a system, not a tool, not a source. That is the point of a byline.

How a story is built

The sequence is the same every time.

Sourcing and verification. Every load-bearing fact is established against a primary source: the actual statute at the General Court site, the actual court ruling, the actual agency page, the actual document produced in response to a records request. Not a caption, not a summary, not another outlet’s characterization. When a bill is involved, the bill text is read, because a one-line legislative caption regularly misstates what the text does.

The fact-check table. Built while the reporting happens, not afterward. One row for every claim the story rests on, each marked verified or attributed, each naming the specific source. That table is published inside the article. Readers see it. It exists so you can check the work rather than trust it.

Drafting. The story is written into a fixed house template with a fixed house style, including a list of banned words and constructions that gets enforced by a script before anything publishes.

Audit. Every draft is run through an automated check for structural problems, style violations, quote-length limits, and one specific legal error this outlet refuses to make. It is then reviewed against a sixteen-category editorial rubric and graded. A piece that does not clear the grade floor does not publish.

Correction. Everything after publication is governed by the corrections policy, a separate standing page.

The part most outlets will not print

Granite State Report is produced with software assistance, including large language models. Those tools are used in the research process, in tabulating and formatting the fact-check table, in checking drafts against the style rules, and in editorial review. They are used the way a newsroom uses a research desk and a copy desk.

Here is the boundary, and it does not move.

A tool that summarizes a document does not establish that the document says what the summary says. A tool that drafts a paragraph does not establish that the paragraph is true. In both cases the verification step is done by a person, against the source, and it is recorded in the fact-check table that publishes with the piece. The table is the receipt.

Software is never the source of a fact. It is not cited as one, it is not relied on as one, and where a claim cannot be traced to a document, a filing, a statute, or a person, that claim is cut or labeled as unverified.

Publishing this is a risk. It would be easier to say nothing and let readers assume a method that flatters the outlet. But an accountability newsroom that conceals its own process has already lost the argument it exists to make, and a disclosure made now is a policy while the same disclosure made under pressure is a scandal.

What never happens

Quotes are never generated, reconstructed, smoothed, or approximated. A quotation mark on this site means a person said those exact words and there is a record of it. Where the wording is uncertain, the passage is paraphrased and labeled as a paraphrase.

Documents are never described from memory. Images are never generated to depict a real event, a real place, or a real person. Sources are never invented, and neither are statutes, case citations, docket numbers, agencies, or web addresses. Where something cannot be verified, the story says so rather than filling the hole with a confident sentence.

Records requests

A large share of this outlet’s reporting rests on requests filed under New Hampshire’s Right-to-Know Law. Two things about that are worth stating plainly, because both are regularly misstated.

When an agency produces records, the production itself is described in the story: what was asked for, what arrived, what did not, what was redacted, and whether the redactions carried the exemption statements the statute requires. When an agency does not respond, that is reported as a fact about the agency, not as a gap in the story.

Corrections

A verified factual error is corrected promptly and carries a dated note saying what the earlier version said, what is correct, and when the change was made. A correction that changes the meaning of a story goes at the top of the article; a minor one goes at the bottom. The original publication date does not change, the note is never removed or backdated, and the same correction is logged on the corrections register. Nothing is silently deleted or rewritten to hide a mistake, and no factual error is fixed without a note. The full terms are on the corrections policy page.

That commitment is not a courtesy. This outlet has published documentary findings about records that were altered after the fact by agencies that could not produce their own version history. Work like that is worth nothing if the outlet doing it cannot survive the same test.

Money

Granite State Report accepts commissioned investigations. Where a story was commissioned, who paid is named in a disclosure line on the piece. Organizations are always named; an individual facing a real safety risk from being named raises it up front and the editor decides. A commission that requires secrecy about who paid is declined. No commission is taken from a candidate, a campaign, a party, or a political committee, or from any party to a matter this outlet is already covering. Editorial control stays with the editor from pitch to publication: no preview, no approval, no veto, and the client sees the piece when readers do.

Conflicts

Where the editor filed the records request the story is about, or is named in the story, a disclosure block appears in the piece itself. That block is not optional and it is not buried at the bottom.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Version log. v1.0, September 17, 2026: initial publication. Every subsequent revision to this page will be listed here with its date and a one-line description of what changed. This page is never edited without a log entry.