Today, the Bangor Daily News is excited to announce the formation of a grassroots effort to sustain and grow independent local journalism in Maine that it has helped to launch.
The United States is losing two newspapers every week. In 2002, Maine newsrooms employed more than 300 daily journalists. Today, that number is around 90. When newspapers shrink or close, communities suffer. Fewer people volunteer or vote, taxes go up and corruption flourishes.
That is why a group of news organizations and supporting partners this year started the Maine Independent News Collaborative, an organization committed to the mission of sustaining quality local journalism for all Mainers.
The Maine Independent News Collaborative is a new journalism collaborative representing 1.5 million readers comprising five local news organizations with common values: Amjambo Africa, Bangor Daily News, the Lincoln County News, the Penobscot Bay Press and The Quoddy Tides, and led by founding partners Bangor Daily News, Eastern Maine Development Corp. and the Unity Foundation. The project is fiscally sponsored by EMDC.
We’re banding together to fund shared reporting resources, improvements to the digital technologies that deliver our journalism to readers and a collaborative inter-newsroom structure to facilitate statewide accountability and enterprise reporting.
The Maine Independent News Collaborative’s partners “are harnessing the power of collective strength to enable us to keep on doing what we do best — sharing information with small and/or marginalized communities so they can be fully participating members of our democracy,” Amjambo Africa Editor in Chief Kathreen Harrison said. Collaboration is necessary to “ensure that [our] newspaper remains a healthy and relevant resource of local news far into the future,” Quoddy Tides editor and publisher Edward French said.
Together, we are asking: How might we support Maine communities by strengthening local journalism? How might Maine communities that lack local reporting today prosper with its return? How might sharing resources help all of us better serve our readers, and tell more ambitious stories with statewide reach and impact?
Penobscot Bay Press publisher Nat Barrows is hopeful that the Maine Independent News Collaborative will increase his organization’s ability “to be nimble to respond to the changing news ecosystem and environment,” while BDN managing editor Dan MacLeod is focused on the potential for “expanded capacity for local investigations.”
Seed funding from the Elmina B. Sewall Foundation is making it possible to begin this groundbreaking work with planning grants for digital technology investments in 2024.
Learn more about the Maine Independent News Collaborative and our plans at maineindependentnewscollaborative.org.
