The New England Signal is building original, independent coverage of the communities that make up New England. As we grow, we're expanding our team of reporters and looking for journalists who know their state and want to tell its stories.

We're hiring in all six states

We're looking for reporters based in — and covering — each of the six New England states:

• Connecticut
• Maine
• Massachusetts
• New Hampshire
• Rhode Island
• Vermont

Whether you're an experienced beat reporter or an early-career journalist with strong local knowledge, we'd like to hear from you.

How to apply

Interested? Email us at [email protected] with a short note about the state you'd cover and a few samples of your work. We read every message and reply to reporters whose interests fit our coverage.

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.

If you arrived here from the line at the bottom of a brief, this is how that brief was written.

The New England Signal uses AI to write short news briefs from press releases issued by prosecutors and police departments. The system reads the agency’s public announcement and summarises it. The brief runs under the byline “Signal Bot” and publishes automatically — no editor reads it before it goes live, and every one of them carries a line saying so.

A brief like that is a summary of a single public document and nothing more. It attributes what it reports to the agency that issued it, and where someone has been charged rather than convicted, it says so. There are whole categories of story the desk will not touch at all — among them cases involving minors, sexual offences, suicides, active manhunts, police shootings and immigration enforcement — because those need a reporter rather than a summariser. We would rather be absent from a story than automate it badly.

Why we do it this way

We use AI so that journalists can spend their hours on the stories that cannot be written with AI. A press release restated is a public document that already exists, written by the government and released to everyone; it is not work worth a reporter’s morning. The stories that matter rarely arrive that way. They need someone with a notebook, a phone, and the standing to ask an uncomfortable question twice. That is where we want our people, and it is a fair thing to hold us to.

Corrections

If a brief is wrong, tell us and we will correct it on the page. Write to [email protected] and say which brief and what is wrong with it. A machine drafted it; the responsibility for it is entirely ours.