It's been nearly a year and a half since Maine's largest newspaper group was bought and turned into a nonprofit operation under the Maine Trust for Local News.
Publisher and Chief Executive Lisa DeSisto is stepping down. Her successor will be Stephanie Manning, the managing director.
Both women say they understand the challenges facing the Portland Press Herald, Maine Sunday Telegram, Lewiston Sun Journal and the several other daily and weekly newspapers the Maine Trust now controls.
As DeSisto wrote in a recent letter to readers, the road ahead must also include a path to sustainability.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
DeSisto: Well, I think it's figuring out how to use our traditional sources of revenue, so print advertising, which is really challenged right now, subscription revenue, and also we've had a lot of success, believe it or not, growing commercial print revenue. So we've brought a lot of new customers into our plant in South Portland. And then on top of those traditional revenue streams, it's figuring out what are the growth areas. It's digital advertising, it's digital audience, it's branded content, it's events. So how can we get those to grow faster as we watch the other traditional forms be certainly be challenged.
Gratz: Stephanie, so let's talk about the business, which now has changed because it's a nonprofit.
Manning: We are really buoyed by the support of the Maine community. We saw that come to light as the National Trust stepped in. There was really good support for us staying in safe hands. Since that time, the National Trust has been working on transformation dollars to help us invest in the places that we need to in order for the business to grow. You know, there's kind of this bifurcation between where you have to invest to become a digital media company versus the legacy part of our business. So the investments are going into digital transformation.
On behalf of newspaper readers my age, I have to ask, how much longer will you be printing a newspaper?
Manning: You're looking at the same crystal ball that we're looking at. I mean, we we recognize as the oldest state in the country that we probably have longevity beyond other parts of the country. What we have to figure out is, as the print revenues continue to decline, how do we manage the expense that comes along with delivering newspapers, especially in our complicated geographies?
The Press Herald, of course, is now publishing its e-editions, which kind of present the paper as it's laid out in print. I'm curious as to whether that's what you see as the electronic future.
Manning: I think that's a really important component part of our digital future. I think part of the conundrum that we have to untangle is we have to meet people where they are, right? Like, traditional newspaper readers know how to read that format. It's a great way to get them comfortable with being in a digital environment to consume their local news. People who go to the web — it's a different reader. It's a different experience. They're finding it in different ways, whether it's through our newsletters or through search, looking for Maine news through any search engine. The app is a completely separate experience. And what we know is that as the world becomes more mobile centric, that's a really important way to be able to access information,
DeSisto: And it's also hard to think about having your resources aligned against all these different ways that people want to consume news. One of the things I'm most proud of that we've done recently is we brought our sports teams together across all of our properties under the brand of Varsity Maine, and through a grant from the Lenfest Institute, we invested in video capabilities, and now our sports reporters are out there doing postgame interviews. They're micing up players like they're on ESPN, and we're pushing these videos out to the social media channels, where, for the first time, we're actually getting high school athletes to say, 'I saw that on Instagram.'
Have you been able to hold on to enough journalism staff?
DeSisto: Yeah, yes, we absolutely have. I mean, the thing that we prioritize are reporters, photographers and editors.
Manning: One of the investments that we've made since the National Trust came on the scene was really to invest in community reporters. Our uber-local weekly publications, who were very thinly staffed, all now, for the most part, have at least one reporter in the local communities that those newspapers serve, so that we can be in the town hall meetings and the school board meetings and all of those places where we know we need to be.