Bill Nemitz, a longtime columnist for the Portland Press Herald, is leading a group that hopes to buy the newspaper's parent organization — which owns many other daily and weekly newspapers around the state — and run it as a nonprofit.
Nemitz says the group has spoken with Reade Brower, the current owner of the Press Herald's parent group, Masthead Maine, who is looking to sell the company.
"We have spoken to Reade and he has made it very clear that he's interested in this idea, that he maintains a very open mind toward it, and I would say our relationship with Reade right now is a very positive one," Nemitz says.
The new group is called the Maine Journalism Foundation. Early backers include Emily Barr, a former Chief Executive of Graham Media group, and Bill Burke, a former Chief Executive of The Weather Channel Companies, and former owner of the Portland Sea Dogs.
In a column published yesterday in the Maine Sunday Telegram, Nemitz wrote the group is hoping to raise $15 million to fund its acquisition.
Masthead Maine publishes the Portland Press Herald, the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Kennebec Journal, the Morning Sentinel and a variety of weekly newspapers around the state.
To learn more about the nonprofit's goals, Maine Public's Irwin Gratz spoke with Emily Barr. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity:
Barr: one of the things I've noticed looking around the country is that some of these nonprofit models, once they're free of the need to support a corporation or a venture capital firm, or whoever it is that might take you over, they're in a better position to be supported by the community and serve the community with a little less palace intrigue, so to speak.
Gratz: Because I know this has been done in a few places. Salt Lake City comes to mind, I believe Baltimore as well. But so far, you're saying the results from those experiments have been good?
Yes. And I did have a chance to witness sort of up close what happened in Chicago with WBEZ public radio and the Chicago Sun Times. I really did want to see the Chicago Sun Times survive, because I think what makes an ecosystem really work is when you have multiple parties involved. You're not just relying on one source of news. So in the case of a city like Chicago, which is big, you had the Tribune and you had the Sun Times, then you had other local digital startups and things like that. But you need all of that.
Do you see these continuing to be printed products, or is part of what's going to happen here is that more of this content will move to online formats?
I suspect over time, more and more will go to online. Maine is a state where the population is older compared to other states. So I think there is still a great need for the printed product. So I would never venture to say that we're going to get rid of the printed product entirely. But I suspect that we would encourage better development of digital production, as I think everyone in media has to do today.
Are there particular areas of news coverage, that if all went well, you'd like to see expanded?
Well, generally speaking, I think that as a democracy, we want to have and we must have a pretty strong, investigative type of journalism out there to help really protect the consumers and the community, you know, from the powerful. It can sound very pie in the sky, but it really isn't. I think at the end of the day, our country thrives in part because we have a separate journalistic entity, or entities, that keep a good watch on what's going on. You know, it's funny, I always say to people, when it comes to local journalism, what are we really talking about? We're talking about making sure we have clean water, clean air, good schools, hopefully low crime, that taxes are fair, I'm not saying they go away, but that that we are keeping an eye on all of these things. And it would be my hope that a strong paper, or papers, in Maine could help support that.
I know your organization is hoping to raise $15 million. Do you have any sense of where that's going to come from or how likely you are to be able to succeed?
It's a little early to say, because we're just getting started, we are talking to a number of people, and grant writing organizations and foundations and things like that. So we really hope that this will be money coming from a wide swath of people interested in and living in Maine.
What are the challenges as you see them that would face the future of these publications and your attempt to to operate them?
You have to be able to tell the story to the community out there in a way that makes them understand the urgency. So it's easy enough to bemoan the loss of journalism and the loss of newspapers and digital entities once they're gone. But you really need to try and get that story conveyed while they still exist.
Are you excited?
Oh, yeah. I ran the TV station division for The Washington Post company. They then sold the newspaper right after I joined. But the newspaper for that company was always, you know, the sort of core of their being. I think I got a lot of that just working working for the Graham family. So I'm very excited and I'm very hopeful that a state like Maine can really support an effort like this.