Jennifer Moore wakes early, before the birds most mornings. By 4:30am, the GBH News Statewide and Features Editor brews her coffee and focuses on her own writing, hours before her work day begins.
“By the time our Editor’s Meeting rolls around [8:45am], my day is well underway,” Moore says. “We bounce ideas around, weigh-in on what our teams’ agendas are for the day, and often I’ll give a preview of the features we have lined up for the next few days. After our newsroom-wide meeting where we talk through the day’s stories and listen for tips that come in from our reporters, I get to work producing and editing stories.”
Central to the ambit of Moore’s role is the Connecting the Commonwealth initiative, which she heads up in coordination with the newsrooms of GBH, CAI (Cape and Islands Radio) and NEPM (New England Public Media, based in Springfield). Leveraging the long-standing strong relationships between the stations, the partnership is distinct from efforts like The New England News Collaborative. Connecting the Commonwealth aims to expand and unify news coverage across the state, with all three stations sharing each other’s stories and collaborating on wide-reaching, incisive series. Having worked in public media for the better part of 20 years in both her home state of Missouri and the Middle East, Moore is right at home integrating the journalism of the three local stalwarts.
As for why something like Connecting the Commonwealth makes particular sense right now, Moore is clear-eyed: “In today’s public media landscape, we’re all trying to do more with less. With so much changing in the media landscape, we looked at our resources as a public media family and saw the talent and trust at our disposal if we worked together — and really only if we worked together.”
After analyzing other models from public media newsrooms in California, Minnesota, Texas, and more, Moore and the team landed on a formula that could work for GBH News and its media partners on the Cape and in Western Massachusetts. “What makes ours special — and trailblazing, I feel — is that we are building a collaboration across many platforms. Some only share one or two platforms, such as radio and web stories; ours, by contrast, is open to include radio, web, TV, digital video (like YouTube), social media, newsletters, and events.”
Over a year since it was announced, Moore and team are beginning to realize the comprehensive potential of the initiative. “Sharing our journalism on a day-to-day basis has been the primary focus of the first chapter of this collaboration,” she says. “With the infrastructure now built out, we’re able to deliver stories from our newsroom to our partners on Cape Cod and in Western Mass. instantaneously, and vice versa. This goes for instant updates as well as long-form stories and features.”
Now that the groundwork has been laid, the partnership looks to tackle more in-depth journalism and community engagement, Moore adds. The first fruits of these collaborative efforts can be found in the multiplatform series, Unraveling Immunity. Looking for an expansive, hard news story that explored an issue of statewide importance, Moore came across vaccine data that showed an increase in exemptions for Massachusetts public school students.
“When I saw Massachusetts had just hit an all-time high in exemptions from vaccines, I thought it was enough of a peg to dive into from a statewide perspective,” says Moore. “And this isn’t about COVID vaccines, but exemptions for diseases like measles and whooping cough that many in the healthcare field thought were long behind us due to the prevalence of effective vaccines.”
“So, we got together, GBH News, CAI, and NEPM, and asked, ‘What are the questions we want to answer?’ When you approach it from that perspective, you almost always end up revealing something.”
For her, this kind of complicated, challenging story is exactly what she finds so compelling and important about her work as a journalist. The issue of vaccine exemptions, she notes, situates a number of core American values at odds — from freedom of religion and the rights of parents to choose what goes into their children’s bodies, to public welfare and the expectation of the state to protect its citizens from disease and harm.
“It’s a fascinating challenge to see the ways these factors butt up against each other and work through it in collaborative storytelling,” she says. “You want to make sure you’re accurately portraying all of the nuances, telling these stories in a way that provides a public service.”
With the holistic approach of Connecting the Commonwealth and an emphasis on “empathetic listening and storytelling,” they captured the multifaceted, dynamic nature of the story. CAI covered the hurdles faced by immigrants on the South Coast to getting vaccinated, whereas NEPM examined school districts in Western Mass. that lagged behind in vaccination rates, and GBH News interviewed a number of religious parents who sought vaccine exemptions for their kids.
“The beauty of this collaboration,” says Moore, “is that all three stations maintain quite a bit of independence and discretion on how we approach our local newsrooms.” In other words, mandates aren’t handed down from GBH to be adopted across the state. Rather, “we discuss story ideas first, then designate reporters based on their expertise, and then fan out across the Commonwealth to do that boots-on-the-ground reporting as a team.”
Another series that exemplifies Connecting the Commonwealth’s integrated, in-depth approach to regional reporting is From Colony to Commonwealth. A rolling, multiplatform feature series that falls under GBH’s America 250 initiative, it explores the role Massachusetts and its people played in the American Revolution. “It’s not a history series,” Moore says. “We’re applying a lens of civics and self-governance to every story, asking people to think in modern terms about how this event, or this element of democracy or self-governance applied then, and how it applies now.”
“We’ve been gradually building momentum on America 250, but this is one of our flagship series’ in the newsroom that recognizes the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, and Massachusetts’ place in it as the cradle of liberty, the birthplace of the Revolution.”
“The team has been digging into old documents, libraries, and oral histories, shining light on the untold and lesser-known stories”, says Moore, such as the story on the Worcester Revolt by GBH News Worcester bureau correspondent Sam Turken. In the piece, Turken documents the thousands of colonists across Western and Central Massachusetts who nonviolently seized control of local courthouses in defiance of British rule. “Sam’s presence and reporting in Worcester is a key part of our effort. Many don’t realize Worcester is New England’s second-largest city, so we have a huge audience to serve there. As we move forward with more statewide projects, the Worcester community will have a prominent spot in that reporting and engagement.”
The days are long, demanding, and full of knotty questions, and the real legwork of Connecting the Commonwealth is just beginning. Still, Jennifer Moore wouldn’t have it any other way. Feature-length journalism combines her affinity for public service with her love for words, complex characters, and urgent narratives. In the newsroom, she’s built up a reputation as the editor who may send your story back if it’s lacking in scenes, moments, or images. The stuff of life, these details and anecdotes add depth and dimension to stories and the people who inhabit them.
“Storytelling, partially in long-form pieces, is singular in its power,” she says. “I appreciate the challenge of finding nuggets of humanity in the stories I edit, coach, and report. It’s so rewarding to bring to life and share the story of someone whom most people wouldn’t otherwise meet. So often these people and stories have something to teach us.”
“My hope,” adds Moore, “is that we can make a mark on how news media serves the people of the Commonwealth. In addition to ongoing series and our daily news-sharing, I want this collaborative to remain open to fresh, bold ideas. It has so much potential and I’m really excited about the different ways we’re going to achieve it.”
You can find the complete Connecting the Commonwealth vertical here, as well as the series pages for Unraveling Immunity and From Colony to Commonwealth. You can read Jennifer Moore’s stories here; if you’d like to learn more about Moore, you can find it here and here.
