This story will be updated.
The owner of Masthead Maine, the state’s largest newspaper company and the publisher of the Portland Press Herald, said Monday that it has agreed to sell to a nonprofit in a deal closing at the end of July.
The move follows rising speculation since March, when Reade Brower indicated he was willing to sell his company and consider all kinds of offers, including converting the business to a nonprofit.
The purchase by the National Trust for Local News is in collaboration with the Maine Journalism Foundation. The trust disclosed $2.6 million in assets and $1.92 million in gross receipts to the IRS in 2021.
Masthead Maine Publisher Lisa DeSisto and her team will remain at the head of the papers. Masthead includes the company’s four dailies, 25 weeklies and six specialty publications. All of the dailies and 17 weeklies are part of the deal, the Press Herald reported.
“The National Trust for Local News believes, like I do, in investing in sustainable business practices and using philanthropy to fuel the mission, rather than to subsidize it,” Brower said in the notice to employees that was obtained by the Bangor Daily News. “They are committed to working with local stakeholders, including the Maine Journalism Foundation, to keep Maine journalism strong and vibrant.”
The sale put to bed the worries that a large, out-of-state newspaper chain or a hedge fund might buy the newspapers and drastically cut staff, further hastening the decline of local news in Maine.
“Private equity firms, hedge funds, venture capitalists are circling the waters right now looking at these properties,” Bill Nemitz, a former Press Herald columnist and president of the Maine Journalism Foundation, told WERU radio in May. “We fear that if they were to purchase them, local news as we know it would really dry up.”
Last summer, DeSisto reached out to business and community leaders, including Nemitz, former Graham Media Group CEO Emily Barr and former Weather Channel Companies CEO Bill Burke, to gauge interest in a nonprofit journalism model.
Those three formed the Maine Journalism Foundation in July with a goal to raise $15 million. It is not clear how much it has raised so far now how much the National Foundation for Local News contributed to the purchase.
The national trust has previous experience with putting together deals to keep local news outlets in the hands of local investors. The first, in May 2021, was a deal to own and operate the Colorado Community Media’s network of 24 Denver-area suburban newspapers with The Colorado Sun under the new name of Colorado News Conservancy. The Colorado Sun, which is journalist-owned and all-digital, owns the majority of the conservancy’s stock, although the national trust put in the most money, Larry Ryckman, co-editor of the newspaper, said.
Each deal will be unique and specific to the newspaper’s situation, according to the trust. The Colorado deal was financed by the FJC foundation of philanthropic funds, which provided a loan to the trust. The loan is guaranteed by the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Trust and the American Journalism Project, Lillian Ruiz, co-founder and chief operating officer of the trust, said in a 2021 webinar held by the University of Colorado Boulder Media Economies Design Lab just after the deal came together.
Ruiz said the board for the Colorado News Conservancy includes three people from the national trust, former Colorado Sun owner Jerry Healy and Ryckman. She said the structure might look different in another deal.
“The goal is for the papers to be autonomously run,” Ruiz said.
The trust also acquired the Denton Record-Chronicle, a century-old Texas newspaper whose previous owner reached out to it to discuss options for his succession. The trust bought the paper in the fall of 2022. It is now part of KERA, a North Texas public media station. The newspaper became a nonprofit entity when it was acquired.
The trust is now turning its attention to the much larger newspaper empire built by Brower. A resident of Camden and a Massachusetts native, Brower founded The Free Press in Rockland in 1985.
Over the next several decades he bought newspapers and printing operations, including the Press Herald’s parent MaineToday Media and the Lewiston Sun Journal, to quickly consolidate Maine’s print media industry. The Bangor Daily News is the only independently owned daily newspaper left in Maine.
BDN writer Michael Shepherd contributed to this report.
