State House News Service

The State House News Service is an independent, privately owned news wire service that has been providing in-depth coverage of Massachusetts state government since 1894. It provides a continuous daily feed of news stories about state-government issues and events, supplemented by photos, audio and video. The SHNS is a subscription-only, paywalled service with limited advertising. Clients include media outlets, government agencies, lobbyists and lobbying firms, political campaigns, advocacy organizations and corporations. The Service produces news stories, daily schedules of state house events, gavel-to-gavel coverage of the House and Senate, and weekly summaries of the week's top stories and of the events and issues likely to be making news in the weeks ahead.

History

The SHNS was founded in 1894 by Charles Mann¹ of Lynn, Mass, a self-educated reporter who began covering the State House beat in 1889 for the Boston Advertiser and Boston Record. It was not unheard of for reporters to cover the beat for more than one paper, nor to form their own small news services. Then as now, Mann's bureau afforded out-of-town papers the opportunity to print firsthand accounts of legislative business and track issues of importance to their communities. Mann added papers and reporters over time, and also worked part-time for state government itself, as a clerk on a special commission redrafting the state's statutes.². In 1903, he took a full-time job with the government, as clerk of the state Railroad Commission, and turned the business over to Charles Copeland.³ The Service has operated continuously since its founding, passing through a succession of six owners to the present day, with the basic product remaining constant: daily news copy covering state government affairs.

Owners

Copeland died in 1913 and his wife Elberta inherited the business.⁴ The Copelands had made headlines themselves, national ones, with their elopement in 1893.⁵

As editor/owner, Elberta spent the first seven years of her career disenfranchised from the government she covered daily; women did not receive the right to vote in Massachusetts until 1920. In time, she took a more passive role in actual news coverage, hiring a successor of editors and at the end of her long career "she just sat in the corner, proud to own the News Service," her great-grandnephew recalled.⁶ Copeland received a formal expression of concern in 1943 from Gov. Leverett Saltonstall about a serious accident, the nature of which was not specified. In 1947, she formally turned over ownership of the New Service to Paul Ryan, her longtime reporter and editor. Ryan

Under Ryan, the News Service continued its unsensationalistic approach to coverage, though the reporters it employed had their quirks. Veteran Boston political reporter Peter Lucas remembered that Ryan tended to hire "unemployed reporters who were down and out with temporary jobs" in addition to the regular line reporters.

Ryan was in competition with the New England News Service, a similar wire with a stronger emphasis on feature stories, established in the late 1930s by Arthur Woodman. Woodman's daughter Helen worked for her father's service, beginning her career after graduating from the University of New Hampshire in 1964. In 1978, with his health declining, Ryan asked Woodman to take over the News Service and she accepted.