The death of Portland’s daily?

The Portland Press Herald and MaineToday Media offices in Portland. Troy R. Bennett | BDN

The Portland Press Herald and MaineToday Media offices in Portland. Troy R. Bennett | BDN

The day Maine newspaper lovers have feared may be on the horizon: the day the Portland Press Herald ceases being a daily.

The news this week that billionaire financier S. Donald Sussman has sold his majority interest in MaineToday Media to the publisher of several weekly papers in midcoast Maine looks like bad news for journalism in this state. There’s reason to fear there’ll be more editorial downsizing, fewer in-depth investigative stories, and continued circulation declines at Maine’s largest news organization.

Longtime political columnist and media critic Al Diamon thinks the sale could portend dramatic reductions in the publication schedules of MaineToday’s papers, which include the Portland Press Herald, Augusta’s Kennebec Journal and the Morning Sentinel in Waterville. Weekday publication could be reduced to two or three times a week in an effort to save money, while more emphasis is placed on online content. Maine’s largest city would then join the ignoble list of metropolises (including New Orleans, Ann Arbor and Birmingham) that can no longer support a daily paper printed on dead trees.

Sussman bought a 75 percent stake in MaineToday in 2012. He reportedly paid $3.3 million for that share. To get a sense of how precipitously the value of print newspapers has fallen this century, consider that the parent company of the Seattle Times had to round up $213 million to buy the Maine dailies in 1998.

In 2009, the Seattle Times Co. sold MaineToday to an investment group headed by Richard Connor, a Bangor native who turned out to be more of a huckster than a hero. Connor presided over further circulation declines and cuts to the newsroom, and effectively bankrupted the enterprise while misappropriating over half a million dollars’ worth of company money for his personal use, according to the company itself.

Sussman reportedly pumped about $13 million into MaineToday, which allowed the papers to hire more reporters, but that didn’t do much to improve the bottom line. MTM publisher and CEO Lisa DeSisto said Sussman’s bolstering of the editorial team helped the papers “[begin] to reverse years of circulation declines,” but the beginning of a reversal is not a reversal. As Diamon reported in a Media Mutt column published in The Bollard (the monthly I own) last fall, the Press Herald’s circulation fell 11 percent between 2012 and 2013, but lost only 6 percent of its readers over the same reporting period last year.

The Press Herald recently jacked up its ad rates and increased its cover price by a whopping 50 percent (from $1 to $1.50), which is bound to further erode revenues and readership of the dead-tree edition this year. The only sure-fire way to regain readers is to focus on producing must-read stories that can’t be found anywhere else (including, in this case, the BDN’s website — which, unlike MTM’s, has no paywall limiting the number of articles visitors can access).

Press Herald staff reporter Whit Richardson’s recent two-part investigation of the tax-credit scheme involving the Great Northern Paper mill is an excellent example of “must-read” journalism. But it’s expensive to devote weeks or months of a reporter’s time to such investigative stories, and in lean times, that’s often the first type of expense that gets cut.

MTM’s new owner is Reade Brower, the publisher of weeklies in Camden, Rockland and Belfast. His partner in the deal is Chris Miles, former publisher of The Times Record in Brunswick, with whom he also owns Alliance Press, a printing facility in Brunswick (where both The Bollard and contract jobs for the BDN are printed). Brower and Miles initially pitched their printing services to MTM, which responded by offering to sell them the entire company (a strong indication Sussman was eager to unload it).

MTM execs are trying to put a happy face on the sale. In a statement, they said all the proceeds will be used to pay off debt inherited from the Connor era, and suggested unspecified, money-saving changes to its printing operations. Asked for his reaction to the news, I’m guessing reporter Tom Bell, president of the newsroom union, was not smiling when he said, “Our focus right now is protecting the rights of our members.” Unlike the reporters and printers at MTM, Brower’s workers are not unionized.

I’d like to believe righting MTM’s ship is just a matter of saving some money on loan interest and printing bills, but like my old friend and mentor Al, I think the currents threatening to sink it are deeper than that. Batten down the hatches — there are stormy seas ahead.

Chris Busby

About Chris Busby

Chris Busby is editor and publisher of The Bollard, a monthly magazine about Portland. He writes a weekly column for the BDN.