Covering New Hampshire business news

Maddie Hanna of the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire interviewed Heidi Copeland, the new owner of Business NH Magazine. She was the former associate publisher.

What follows is an excerpt:

What differentiates your magazine’s business coverage from that provided by New Hampshire Business Review or local newspapers?

We never have enough space to run with all the stories that we really would like to do. But I actually think we’re covering things that no one else is covering. When we were talking about public companies and we realized that Walmart was the biggest employer in New Hampshire, we wrote about that when no one else wrote about it. We started to do an annual salary review, telling what people that work for nonprofits, the university system, the state – kind of unveiling salaries. We got a huge response to that. . . . One hospital president who had asked their employees to take a pay cut had to write all the employees a letter and offer to take a pay cut himself. And so we’re really even going to blow that out in 2011 – it’s going to be bigger than we’ve ever covered.

We cover a lot of the human resources issues that come up that I don’t see anyone else talking about. Whether it’s a co-worker that’s stinky, or the death of a co-worker or a co-worker experiencing a death in their family or personal life – how do you deal with that kind of stuff? We just write about all of those things that come up when you work in the office. We wrote about how some people like the office cold, some people like it hot, and everybody’s fighting over the thermostat. We write things from the funny to the serious.

Legal issues – one of the biggest things we wrote about last year was the 10 biggest New Hampshire labor violations. It turns out most businesses don’t even know when they’re breaking the law, it’s just ignorance of the law, but the fines can be steep.

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