The Monitor Weekly is, as you may have guessed, exactly what it sounds like — no pun intended!
Each week, we, the podcast’s hosts, recruit reporters from our newsroom to discuss one of their recent stories and the reporting process behind that headline. We offer behind-the-scenes, on-the-ground insights into what we consider to be some of the biggest stories in the capital region, from cold cases to local elections.
The project originated from a seedling of shared interest: Alex was The New Hampshire’s digital editor and audiovisual director at UNH and is a frequent listener of podcasts during his commute, and Rebeca was the news editor at her college radio station and a podcast editor in graduate school.
We believe in the power of audio to tell compelling human stories, the bedrock of the Monitor’s journalism. Our approach to local news is people-centered and narrative-based. We lead with community members’ voices and stories, and we take an interest in the minutiae and personal histories that make them three-dimensional. Embarking on an audio reporting project felt like a natural extension of the work we were already doing.
It also presented an opportunity to reach a broader audience and for our existing audience to gain more access our newsroom. We are both early-career journalists in our 20s — we wouldn’t exactly go out of our way to read town meeting coverage if we weren’t responsible for reporting it. We hope the podcast will provide younger news consumers like us with a meaningful doorway into their own communities, spurring an interest in civic engagement and staying informed.
Our established readers know that, apart from our personalized newsletters and the individual flair of each reporter’s writing, there aren’t many opportunities to glean who we are as people or to understand our reporting procedures.
We are not a disembodied, voice-of-God authority, unknowable and unquestionable in our ways. We hit roadblocks in our reporting and have to troubleshoot dead ends. We tell stories with every investigative tool available to us, and even then, a story is a moving target that may abruptly change after publication. We hope the podcast will be a peek behind the veil for those readers — new and old — who crave knowing us better.
So far, we’ve been successful in accomplishing just that.
First, we invited community editor Rachel Wachman to join us behind the microphones and discuss her coverage of two devastating housefires in Franklin and Epsom that shared some uncanny similarities. Rachel walked us through her reporting process, from finding one family’s online fundraising campaign to following both families as they began to rebuild their lives from scratch. Then, we discussed practical tips for fire prevention based on Canterbury Fire and Rescue Lieutenant Herb Batchelder’s decades of experience.
For our second episode, State House reporter Charlotte Matherly joined us to talk about New Hampshire’s therapeutic cannabis program, which provides an alternative to pharmaceuticals for patients suffering from chronic pain, although it can come at an onerous cost. To better understand what one of Charlotte’s sources called state leaders’ “ingrained resistance to cannabis,” we explored a timeline of cannabis legislation in New Hampshire, starting with the inception of the therapeutic cannabis program and ending with former Gov. Chris Sununu’s concession that recreational cannabis is “inevitable.”
Charlotte returned to the podcast, this time accompanied by city reporter Catherine McLaughlin, for episode three. Election season was in full swing, and we had just launched our Concord Votes landing page, an encyclopedia of every candidate running for office in Concord and the major issues on voters’ minds. Catherine and Charlotte walked us through the ballot questions and contested races, which we later revisited in a post-election episode.
Our fourth episode featured a new guest: investigative reporter Sruthi Gopalakrishnan. Together, we recapped two of her stories related to cemeteries: One was a heartwarming picture of volunteers undertaking a cemetery clean-up ahead of Veterans Day, while the other was a heartwrenching account of families who’ve had their mourning hastened by law enforcement at a Bow cemetery. With a handful of episodes under our belts, we also took the opportunity to give a high-level overview of how our newsroom functions, explaining our beat structure and respective roles.
We brought back our inaugural guest, Rachel, for our fifth episode, entitled “When the trail of evidence goes cold.” This is exactly what happened in the case of Betty Place, a mother in Warner who disappeared without a trace one morning in June of 1978. For decades, her children have searched for answers. The addition of two new investigators to the New Hampshire Department of Justice’s Cold Case Unit has inspired renewed hope for people who have lost family members or friends, never received answers in their deaths or disappearances.
Following the election, we reconvened our conversation with Charlotte and Catherine to recap our local election, where incumbents ruled the day despite impressive performances by some first-time challengers. Concord voters indicated a receptiveness to social districts and reaffirmed their established opinion on Keno, continuing to keep the game of chance out of the capital city.
If these discussions intrigue you, if they prompt you to think more deeply about these stories or to wonder about how we approached them, we encourage you to listen to our podcast.
We — Alex, Rebeca and the entire Monitor staff — thank you for your support.