When the Portsmouth Herald cut its staff again last year, a lot of people shrugged. Print is dying, they said. Everyone gets their news from social media now.

But here’s the thing: social media doesn’t cover your school board. It doesn’t report on the zoning variance that’s going to change your neighborhood. It doesn’t tell you why the water bill went up or when the new fire station breaks ground.

The Gap

Local news has been disappearing for two decades. The business model broke, and nobody fixed it. Big papers consolidated or folded. TV stations run skeleton crews. What’s left is often rewritten press releases or wire copy with a local dateline slapped on.

The result? People know more about national politics than what’s happening three blocks away.

A Different Approach

The Granite Morning started as an experiment: what if AI could help fill the gap? Not replace journalists — there aren’t enough of those left to replace — but handle the grind work that makes local coverage possible.

Gathering public meeting agendas. Scanning police logs. Pulling weather data. Summarizing lengthy budget documents. Turning all of it into something a person can listen to in seven minutes while making coffee.

The AI does the assembly. The editorial judgment — what matters, what’s accurate, what’s fair — still requires a human.

What We Cover

Our focus is Rochester, Dover, Somersworth, and the surrounding Seacoast communities. City council meetings. School board decisions. Road projects. Community events. Weather that actually affects your commute, not a national forecast map.

It’s not glamorous. But it’s the stuff that shapes daily life in a way national news never will.

The Format

Every weekday morning, we publish an audio brief with a full transcript. Listen on your way to work. Read it over breakfast. Either way, you’re caught up in under ten minutes.

On weekends, we run longer features like this one — deeper dives into local issues, history, or the people who make these communities work.

Why It Matters

Democracy doesn’t function without informed citizens. And citizens can’t be informed if no one’s paying attention to the decisions being made in their name.

That’s the pitch. Not because AI is magic, but because it’s a tool that might — finally — make sustainable local coverage possible again.

Thanks for being here. We’re just getting started.

The Granite Morning is an AI-assisted local news project covering New Hampshire’s Seacoast region.