Most News Outlets in Maine Are Now Nonprofit

Old-style newspaper boxes flank the entrance. From beyond them comes the smell of ink and newsprint. When the presses roll, the floor vibrates. 

 The building that houses the Portland Press Herald seems a throwback to journalism’s heyday. In fact, it’s part of a case study of the industry’s potential future. 

What happens when the outlets producing most of the news in a state become nonprofit? With little outside notice, that has quietly but steadily been taking place in Maine, New England’s northernmost state.

Most of the daily and many of the weekly newspapers have come under the ownership of the National Trust for Local News, a Colorado-based nonprofit that took them over through a subsidiary called the Maine Trust for Local News. There are at least six other statewide nonprofit news organizations and one that covers the coast and islands. A growing number of Maine’s independent weeklies are nonprofit, new nonprofit news sites are popping up, and nonprofit public radio is reaching farther into the corners of this second-most-rural state in the U.S.

Maine’s new media ecosystem is showing how nonprofit journalism can promote collaboration, investigative reporting, and coverage of underserved groups and disparate points of view. 

But it also includes examples of how nonprofit media can be prone to the same pitfalls as for-profit properties absorbed by corporate chains, including budget cuts and watered-down content. Critics contend that coverage is sometimes so broadly focused that it doesn’t connect with local readers. Many express concerns about who’s paying the bills and with what motives. And there’s constant fear about the funding drying up. 

Still, as almost all of Maine’s media become nonprofit, there is a growing consensus — or perhaps resignation — that it represents one of the best options for newsrooms to keep running. 

“What else are you going to do?” said Nick Mills, a former journalism professor at Boston University who has retired to Maine, where his father was a fishing captain. “You have to look for new models, unless you want to fold your tent forever.” 

Mills is a member of the board of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting and its statewide investigative nonprofit, the Maine Monitor, which was launched in 2020 as a 501(c)(3) charitable group. Other news organizations follow the same standard 501(c)(3) model, including the Harpswell Anchor; several weeklies like the Town Line, which covers more than 20 towns in central Maine; at least three community radio stations; and a nonprofit television station. 

Then there are commercial news organizations that have fiscal sponsors, meaning they associate with 501(c)(3) organizations so that donors can claim tax deductions. 

The Bangor Daily News (BDN) has assembled a network of weeklies called the Maine Independent News Collaborative, and found a fiscal sponsor in the Eastern Maine Development Corp., a workforce and community development nonprofit. This simplifies the process under which the BDN — still independent and family-owned — had already been collecting contributions.

Such giving remains “a small single-digit portion of our overall budget,” said Jo Easton, the News’ development director. But “it helps us hold the water back.” Among the donors to the new collaborative is a foundation established by the horror writer Stephen King and his wife, Tabitha, who live in Maine.

Yet another strand of nonprofit newsrooms is being spun off from advocacy groups, including the Maine Wire, part of the right-leaning Maine Policy Institute; The Working Waterfront, operated by the nonprofit Island Institute, which serves Maine’s coastal towns and islands; and Amjambo Africa!, which was created by the immigrant advocacy group Ladder to the Moon Network.   

Maine’s nonprofit news expansion is a ramped-up version of a trend sweeping across the U.S. The number of members of the nationwide Institute for Nonprofit News, or INN, is closing in on 500, up from about 120 in 2015. Nearly half are local, compared with 1 in 4 in 2017. 

Philanthropic backing for local nonprofit journalism is also on the rise. More than half of philanthropic funders surveyed by researchers at the University of Chicago say they’ve increased their giving to journalism causes in the last five years. The coalition of more than 60 funders behind Press Forward, a charity founded in 2023, has pledged more than $500 million to support local news.

But nonprofit ownership is not a panacea, as the experience in Maine also demonstrates. Philanthropic funders increasingly demand that media organizations find other ways to bring in money. “‘Nonprofit’ is essentially a tax status,” said Will Nelligan, chief growth officer at the National Trust for Local News. “It is not a way to run your business.”

Nonprofits like the National Trust — which swooped in to buy the Portland Press Herald, three of Maine’s four other dailies, and 16 of its weeklies — may have saved the outlets from falling under the control of the for-profit corporations that were bidding for them. But the National Trust is facing scrutiny for failing to specify where the money came from to buy the papers, and for significantly increasing the salary of its own CEO. 

Still, without nonprofits “there simply wouldn’t be coverage,” said J.W. Oliver, editor of the Harpswell Anchor, a weekly that closed in 2020 but was revived as a nonprofit with support from local residents and businesses. 

Maine has a long history of supporting local news. Its first newspaper started publishing before the U.S. Constitution was even drafted. By the middle of the 19th century, there were newspapers in every county, serving a widely scattered, mostly rural population of about 600,000. As in the rest of the country at the time, almost all belonged to local owners.

Unlike in the rest of the country, local ownership in Maine continued well into the 2000s. Though Portland’s Press Herald was sold to The Seattle Times Company in 1998, it came back into local hands a decade later. There were almost no acquisitions by the kind of big corporations that have stripped newspapers elsewhere of their assets or shut them down. The only such instance has been Gannett’s purchase of two small weeklies near the New Hampshire border. 

One reason the big conglomerates have made so little headway in Maine, insiders say, is residents’ antipathy toward “people from away” — among the nicer terms locals use for out-of-staters. “There is generally a skepticism to change and outsiders, and that worked out well in terms of keeping things locally owned,” said Lauren McCauley, editor of the nonprofit Maine Morning Star.

Then there is the lack of financial incentive. Most Maine newspapers remained locally owned because they didn’t make enough money or have enough real estate to be worth buying. “Even before they were nonprofit, many Maine media outlets might as well have been,” Earl Brechlin, former editor of The Bar Harbor Times, joked. 

People in Maine’s more isolated communities have also hung onto a strong sense of civic engagement, according to Stefanie Manning, the managing director at the Maine Trust for Local News, the subsidiary set up by the National Trust to run the Press Herald and other properties. This civic-mindedness “is what’s brought us to today, and the fact that there still are so many printed newspapers all across the state,” Manning said.

At a time when more than 200 counties in the rest of the U.S. — most of them rural — no longer have professional news coverage, every county in Maine still has at least some, according to the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University. Fifty-one news sites and 43 newspapers in Maine survived into the 2020s, all locally owned except for the two bought by Gannett. 

These factors combined to help news outlets in Maine “hang on for a very long time,” said Mark Stodder, who chairs the Maine Trust’s community board. They “sort of set the stage for what we’ve become now” as an incubator for nonprofit journalism, added McCauley of the Maine Morning Star.

Maine has also benefited from its deep well of experienced journalists, media executives, and well-heeled donors who live there or spend summers on its rocky coast and inland lakes and forests. 

But it’s a quirky non-journalist who has played an unlikely but outsized role in Maine becoming a crucible of nonprofit media. 

Reade Brower started his career in Maine by responding to an earlier corporate threat: As big-box stores started to spring up on the fringes of small downtowns, Brower went into business creating coupon sheets for local retailers, building that into a direct-mail and printing company. Then, as family owners began to step aside, he started buying up the newspapers that used his presses. 

Brower came to control all of the state’s daily newspapers, except the Bangor Daily News, and more than 20 weeklies. 

The self-effacing Brower, who wears Hawaiian shirts and prefers to go without shoes, said he didn’t get into the newspaper business out of principle. He did it largely for the economies of scale that came with buying ink and newsprint in bulk. But he came to recognize the larger value of his journalistic properties.

“I’m not on a high horse. I just instinctively know it’s important,” he said, calling it “a noble industry.” 

The challenges besetting the industry in other parts of the U.S. also began to hit Maine. Low profit margins were worsened by declining circulation and competition from digital advertising. The number of journalists in Maine fell from 2,600 in 2001 to 722 by the first half of 2024, according to the state Department of Labor. The Press Herald sold its former headquarters across from Portland’s City Hall; it has since become a newspaper-themed boutique hotel with an art installation in the lobby made of old manual typewriters and tabletops decorated with laminated front pages. 

The COVID-19 pandemic aggravated the industry’s financial problems. A few more Maine weeklies blinked out, and newspapers got smaller and thinner, although there was also a surge in readers making unsolicited donations. In 2023, with debt to repay and no succession plan, Brower put his newspapers up for sale. When deep-pocketed private companies with histories of downsizing came sniffing around, Mainers decided to gamble on the very long odds of turning Brower’s papers into nonprofit operations.

The first impulse was to set up a nonprofit called the Maine Journalism Foundation that would attempt to raise enough money to buy Brower’s holdings. The campaign was helmed by a retired Press Herald columnist, Bill Nemitz. 

The union representing employees at the Press Herald and another of the dailies owned by Brower begged him to give the nascent organization time to meet its goal of raising $15 million. But outside companies were circling. Speaking on background because they were required to sign non-disclosure agreements, a number of sources with knowledge of the talks confirm that these prospective buyers included Gannett, Alden, Minnesota-based Adams Publishing Group, and David Smith, executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group. 

Contributions trickled into the Maine Journalism Foundation, including some from the newspapers’ employees, but didn’t come close to what was needed to win the “chaotic” race for ownership, Nemitz said.

At the last minute, the National Trust for Local News showed up. The organization was co-founded in 2021 by Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, who laid out its modus operandi in a paper she co-authored as a research fellow at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy: Rather than pump money into newsrooms, the trust would acquire them outright, using a pool of money big enough to compete with for-profit buyers (initially around $300 million, Shapiro has suggested). The organization had already bought two dozen newspapers on Colorado’s front range, and would soon add 18 more in Georgia.

Brower took the National Trust’s offer, settling for less than what he said he could have gotten for the papers from the for-profit companies. He felt confident that the trust wasn’t “going to cut their way to prosperity” as other bidders might. “If you can find a better model, do it. But this was the best one I could find,” he said. 

Nemitz transferred the money his foundation had collected to the National Trust to be used toward the purchase. But relief over the group’s intervention, for him and some others in Maine, proved short-lived.

With their suspicion of “people from away,” Mainers started scrutinizing the National Trust’s purchase — starting with who paid for it, which the Trust repeatedly promised to disclose when the acquisition closed in 2023, but still hasn’t.

The news website Semafor reported that some of the money came from liberal billionaire donors George Soros and Hansjörg Wyss. 

“They’re doing themselves a disservice by failing the basic authenticity test” and not specifying who put up the money to buy the Maine Trust’s newspapers, said Steven Robinson, editor of the Maine Wire, which has taken to calling those papers “Soros-backed” and “far-left content publishers.” Robinson’s own outlet receives money from conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, Semafor reported. 

Nelligan, the National Trust’s chief growth officer and also a Maine native, called this “a manufactured controversy.” All of the money for the Maine papers went through the National Trust, he said. “There isn’t one funder or two funders [alone] that funded this acquisition.” At least one Maine donor has asked not to be named, Nelligan added. 

Like much else that has been criticized, the funding question is complicated by the Maine Trust’s little-understood, unusual structure. While the National Trust for Local News is a conventional 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the Maine Trust has yet another tax designation. It’s an L3C, or low-profit limited liability company. In short, it’s a for-profit subsidiary of a nonprofit, still expected to make enough to pay for all or most of its own operations. 

Many financial supporters of nonprofit journalism are pushing sustainability like this, seeing their role as “seeding good work that gets its legs and prospers,” as Rick Edmonds, media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, writes. More than half of funders say their goal is to help grantees develop sustainability, according to a survey by Media Impact Funders.

The National Trust’s approach is to use philanthropy to buy newsrooms and invest in “transformation,” paying for consultants to propose cost-cutting and revenue-producing measures — but not to cover day-to-day costs. It’s also centralizing business functions such as employee benefits and purchasing to realize economics of scale. 

That’s not what many Mainers say they were expecting. Some complain that this centralization of back-office roles, along with the sharing of content, marks the beginning of a loss of local control, which they liken to what Gannett and the hedge funds do. 

“They’re building a chain,” Cliff Schechtman, the Press Herald’s former executive editor, fumed. “They’re no different than any other chain ownership, with the exception of a tax exemption.”

But even in its weakened state, journalism “is still a $20 billion industry,” Nelligan responded. “And if you think philanthropy can replace that dollar for dollar, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. We have an obligation as an industry to think creatively about solutions.”

The plethora of nonprofit news organizations in Maine also raises the broader concern that there may not be enough money to pay for it there or elsewhere. Nonprofit journalism organizations across the country say the philanthropy they’re getting falls far short of what they need. 

Another lesson from Maine, said Megan Gray, an arts reporter at the Press Herald and president of the News Guild of Maine — which represents employees at the Press Herald and the Central Maine Morning Sentinel — is that “nonprofit ownership doesn’t automatically fix the problems in the industry, and one of those problems is pay.” Several freelance columnists at the Press Herald have been let go. 

The journalism produced by the nonprofits in Maine is being closely watched. In particular, critics have pounced on something Shapiro, who stepped down as the National Trust’s CEO in January, once wrote — that “a focus on building communities through quality local news may mean giving as much space to covering the high school’s winning team or a local restaurant’s grand opening as to an accountability investigation of the local school board.”

Schechtman, the former Press Herald executive editor, said the Maine Trust papers’ news output is “getting softer and softer.” He cited a New Year’s Day feature in the Press Herald about children’s hopes for 2025.

Nelligan said there’s room for both hard and soft news, and that “one of those things gives us the revenue to do the other.”

There’s an equal and opposite concern that larger statewide nonprofit newsrooms are investing their resources in months-long investigative projects that don’t necessarily connect with readers’ primary concerns.

Tom Groening, editor of The Working Waterfront and a veteran reporter, cited a Maine Monitor story about wealthy summer residents near Bar Harbor trying to block affordable housing. Although the story was well-reported, Groening said, “it doesn’t help the single mother who wants to know what’s going to happen to her kid’s school.”

That’s not the Maine Monitor’s job, Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, its executive director, responded. “We’re really clear that we’re not a daily newspaper and we’re not hyper-local.” The nonprofit exists to do the in-depth investigative journalism that newspapers have a harder time affording these days. And much of it “is very directly linked to people’s lives,” Schweitzer-Bluhm added.  

In the Maine Press Association’s most recent annual journalism contest, the winners included an investigative report that showed how the state’s judiciary had closed off public online access to most court documents, citing security concerns; another that revealed part-time, elected probate judges were approving guardianship agreements but failing to monitor them; and yet another that exposed how county jails were recording supposedly confidential attorney-client phone calls. All three were produced by nonprofit outlets.

“The average Mainer still gets a lot of good information about what’s happening here,” the Maine Morning Star’s McCauley said. The journalism generally “feels healthier than [in] other states.”

Nonprofit support also appears to increase collaboration. The Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey has tracked more than 1,160 collaborative journalism projects since 2018, many involving nonprofit partners. The Portland Press Herald, now under the umbrella of the National Trust for Local News, teamed up with Maine Public on 2024 election coverage and on a one-year retrospective of the fatal shootings of 18 people at a bar and bowling alley in Lewiston. The Bangor Daily News worked with ProPublica on a story about high eviction rates from public housing. 

“Collaboration is built into the ethos of nonprofit media,” said Jonathan Kealing, chief network officer at the Institute for Nonprofit News. “It helps us be more efficient about telling more stories.”

According to Schweitzer-Bluhm, the ultimate lesson from Maine is that whatever the shortcomings or complexities of nonprofit journalism, “there’s no future of journalism that does not include philanthropic support. There’s no going back.”