Where Do You Get Your News? Ever Heard Of Daybreak?

Rob Gurwitt in his back yard in Norwich, Vermont. (Sean Hurley/NHPR)

NHPR currently has a survey where we’re asking you how you’d like us to cover the upcoming elections. One question we’re asking – to learn more about you – is where you get your news.  And your answers to this question caught the attention of reporter Sean Hurley.

Along with NHPR, The New York Times and The Washington Post, many tell us they get their news from something called Daybreak. What in the world was Daybreak, Sean wondered? Here’s what he found out.

As he’s done for almost two years now, Rob Gurwitt wakes at 4:30 every morning. He goes downstairs, starts the coffee, turns on his laptop…and begins to write. “It started as an experiment,” Gurwitt says, “I had no idea whether it was going to last beyond a week, let alone you know a year and a half now, but it started with 25 friends.  So the voice in it was just me talking to friends.”

At 62, Gurwitt has been a journalist for most of his career, but in the last few years the long-form reporting work he was good at was getting harder and harder to find.

“I spent the bulk of my career writing, you know, 3,000 to 8,000-word articles,” he says, “those days are gone in the magazine world. And oddly I really like writing these short things.”

“Writing these short things” is nearly Gurwitt’s new job in the form of a daily email newsletter called Daybreak, a charmingly written harvest of world and local news from the Upper Valley, Vermont and New Hampshire.

Read the rest of this story at NHPR’s website.