The National Trust for Local News, which is dealing with a leadership transition (see the last item) and business woes, got some good news recently. Three weekly papers in Maine have reached an agreement to be printed at the Trust’s presses in South Portland.
According to a story by Cyndi Wood in The Ellsworth American, whose presses will cease operations, the papers will include not just the American but also the Mount Desert Islander and the Midcoast Villager, which is based in Camden. All three papers are owned by Reade Brower, and therein lies an interesting tale.
The South Portland facility is owned by the Maine Trust for Local News, a nonprofit organization that publishes the for-profit daily Portland Press Herald and several smaller papers. The Maine Trust, in turn, is part of the National Trust — and Brower sold the Press Herald and its sister papers to the National Trust in 2023.
Brower’s advertising company will manage the presses, Wood writes. She also quotes Brower:
Consolidating our printing to South Portland is a necessary step to ensure our local papers in Midcoast and Down East Maine remain economically viable. The presses in Ellsworth are older and not as efficient as the equipment in South Portland, and presses are in need of significant resources to modernize — money I felt better invested in our newspaper product.
The Midcoast Villager is a pretty interesting story in its own right. As Mark Caro writes for the Medill Local News Initiative, Brower and his business partner, Kathleen Fluery Capetta, created the paper in 2024 by combining four smaller papers. That usually means less coverage, but the Villager has been expanding, making high-profile hires, opening a café and using a custom-designed AI system to extend its coverage.
Jules Walkup, a Report for America corps member with the Bangor Daily News, has a story about the café, writing:
Since the Villager Cafe opened about two weeks ago, it has been successful on several fronts, according to the Midcoast Villager’s publisher, Aaron Britt. The food and coffee are good, and readers are already using it to engage with the reporters, he said. On Fridays, the cafe hosts “Fresh Brewed News,” a time in which the community can come together and discuss the Thursday paper and ask the staff questions. Britt also said editors will have office hours in the cafe about once a month.
The National Trust, which owns more than 60 papers in Colorado, Maine and Georgia, recently hired a new chief executive, Tom Wiley, currently president and publisher of The Buffalo News. Wiley will replace co-founder Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who stepped aside as CEO earlier this year. Ellen Clegg discussed Wiley’s hiring on our most recent “What Works” podcast.
After an initial flurry of optimism, the Maine papers have been beset by cuts (though no layoffs) and the departure of several high-ranking executives. It sounds like the deal with their former owner will result in a much-needed infusion of revenue.
Fake news, guns and paranoia
What happens when a community loses most of its local news coverage? Reporter Eli Tan and photographer Ulysses Ortega attempted to answer that question in a sprawling New York Times piece (gift link) that appeared in the Sunday paper.
The Times examined Oakdale, California, a town of 20,000 residents where “not a single one” of the 80 people interviewed “subscribed to a regional news site, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or The Washington Post.” The result has been a rise in rumors spread on Facebook groups as well as misinformation and disinformation — including an invasion by a militia during the COVID pandemic of 2020. Tan writes:
The militia was prepared to defend against an imminent threat: Black Lives Matter protesters, they believed, were plotting to invade the town and would be arriving on buses from the Bay Area at any moment.
They waited and waited. But the protesters never came.
The area is served by the daily Modesto Bee, which had more than 100 reporters a quarter-century ago but now is down to a dozen, and a small weekly paper called the Oakdale Leader. The Bee is owned by the once-respected McClatchy chain, which is now controlled by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. The Falun Gong-affiliated Epoch Times has gained a foothold as well.
Civic engagement is crucial to the health of communities, and is in turn reliant on reliable sources of news and information. What is afflicting Oakdale and the surrounding communities, in the Times’ telling, is a toxic mix of fake news, guns and paranoia.
Going nonprofit in Spokane
In March 2015 I visited the Orange County Record in Southern California to report on efforts by then-lead owner Aaron Kushner, a wealthy entrepreneur based in the Boston area, to rebuild the tattered daily. Kushner had previously made unsuccessful attempts to buy The Boston Globe and the Portland Press Herald.
As it turned out, Kushner was near the end of his brief time as the owner, as his rapid expansion, fueled by overspending, would soon result in his being forced out by his partners. Today the Register is owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital. I wrote about Kushner and the Register in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls.”
While I was in Orange County, I had a chance to meet the then-editor, Rob Curley. He was cordial and engaging, but he would not give me an interview. Too bad, because he was a digital pioneer who had been among those who helped get washingtonpost.com off the ground in the 1990s, long before Jeff Bezos acquired the paper.
After the Kushner meltdown, Curley decamped for Spokane, Washington, where he became executive editor of The Spokesman-Review. And now he’s heading an effort to take the paper nonprofit. Editor & Publisher’s Gretchen A. Peck takes a deep dive into Curley’s efforts.
The Spokesman-Review will become just the second daily paper to go fully nonprofit, after The Salt Lake Tribune, although there are a few others that are for-profits owned by nonprofits, including the aforementioned Press Herald.
“For most news nonprofits, the business model is: We’re out of money. Can we please have more? That is not going to be our model,” Curley told Peck. “It is going to be a hybrid model, based on circulation, advertising and sponsorships and philanthropy.”
The Cowles family, which is selling the paper, will match the nonprofit’s fundraising by up to $2 million for the first five years.
Needless to say, if Curley is able to make a go of it, The Spokesman-Review will be looked to as a hopeful model for the rest of the news business.
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