Who we are, who does not pay for us, and what we are trying to do about a region that has lost most of its reporters.
The New England Signal covers government, public safety and education across all six New England states — Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. We report on what public officials decide, what it costs, and what happens to the people on the other end of it.
We are independent, and we intend to stay that way
We are independent of government and of corporate ownership. We take zero government grant funding. Not a grant, not a subsidy, not a line in anyone’s budget. A newsroom whose job is to hold officials to account should not be financed by the officials it covers, and no amount of good intention survives that arrangement indefinitely. We would rather be smaller than compromised.
Nor are we the property of a chain, a hedge fund or a holding company with opinions about which stories are convenient. Nobody buys coverage here and nobody buys its absence. If we ever get something wrong, it will be because we made a mistake — not because someone preferred it that way.
Old rules, new tools
The craft is not up for reinvention. Get it right. Attribute it to someone who will stand behind it. Distinguish a charge from a conviction and an allegation from a finding. Call the person the story is about before it publishes, not after. Correct errors quickly, in public, where the error was. Those rules were settled long before us and we are not looking to improve on them.
What has changed is how much journalism a small newsroom can produce, and where readers actually are. So we use new technology hard — to read public records at a scale no reporter could, to turn routine public documents into something readable the same day, and to publish where people already are rather than waiting for them to come and find us. The aim is more real reporting, not less: every hour a machine spends restating a press release is an hour a reporter spends on a story that no machine could get.
We are also straightforward about which is which. Some of our short briefs are drafted by software, every one of them says so on the page, and we keep a plain-English account of exactly how that works and what we refuse to let it touch. Read it here: How we use AI.
What we are for
We want an informed New England — a region where the public knows what its officials are doing and why. The second half is the harder and more important one. A vote, a settlement, a budget line and an arrest are all easy enough to record; the reasoning behind them is where accountability actually lives, and it is the first thing to disappear when nobody is in the room.
Across New England, fewer and fewer people are in the room. Statehouses, city halls, zoning boards and courthouses that once had a reporter at the back now have nobody at all. We exist to put someone back there, and to write down what happens in language a person can use.
Tell us when we are wrong
We would rather be corrected than flattered. If we have published something inaccurate, write to [email protected], say which story and what is wrong with it, and we will fix it on the page. News tips and documents go to the same address.
