illustration/Larry Hayden, courtesy Beem
An op-ed by Edgar Allen Beem
My checkered journalism career came to an abrupt end in the summer of 2023 when the weekly Portland Phoenix ceased publication. I started writing for Maine newspapers as a 16-year-old high school student in 1965, so it is a little strange to be put out to pasture at 75.
Over the years, I was the student reporter for the Westbrook American, book reviewer for the Maine Sunday Telegram, art critic for the Portland Independent, a columnist for the Portland Evening Express, staff writer for Maine Times, a contributing editor at two regional magazines, and I ended up writing an opinion column, The Universal Notebook, for 20 years. The Universal Notebook started in The Forecaster in 2003 and ended in the Phoenix two decades later.
At the height of my career I was kept busy freelancing for a dozen or so magazines and newspapers, chief among them Down East, Yankee, Boston Globe Magazine and Photo District News. But as the editors got younger and younger and I got older and grumpier, my contributions to mainstream journalism slowed to a trickle.
The future of journalism now rests in younger hands, and that future increasingly looks headed in the direction of nonprofits and consolidation.
Last year, the non-profit Maine Trust for Local News purchased five dailies and 17 weeklies from media mogul Reade Brower. A few years ago I invited Brower to speak to a group of veteran media types, d.b.a. The Geezers, and he explained to us over lunch that he had picked up all those newspapers, often at fire-sale prices, not out of any editorial or political agenda, but because there were economies of scale to be had in advertising and printing when you own most of the papers in the state.
Now Brower is merging the staffs and production operations of the weekly community newspapers he still owns in Camden, Rockland and Belfast into one newspaper, the Midcoast Villager. My guess is the Maine Trust for Local News will eventually have to do the same, consolidating their daily and weekly newspapers into a single news operation: one paper, one website, and one staff serving Greater Portland, Brunswick, Lewiston/Auburn, Biddeford/Saco, Augusta and Waterville. Readers are already seeing the same stories printed in multiple Trust newspapers, so consolidating the newsroom seems the next logical move in the attempt to keep local journalism alive in Maine.
Back in June, Portland Press Herald executive editor Steve Greenlee left to teach at Boston University. In September, the Maine Trust announced it had hired Tampa Bay Times managing editor Carolyn Fox to be the new executive editor, putting her in charge not only of the Portland papers, but also “the newsrooms of the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Kennebec Journal in Augusta, the Morning Sentinel in Waterville, The Times Record in Brunswick and several weekly papers in southern and western Maine,” the Herald reported.
Good luck with all of that.
Groups like the Maine Trust, Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting and Maine Independent News Collaborative are valiantly trying to keep local news coverage viable, but that ultimately only works if you are actually part of the community you serve. For decades, the Press Herald and Sunday Telegram were headquartered in downtown Portland, across the street from City Hall. But a previous owner sold that iconic building many years ago, it’s now a boutique hotel, and the newspaper has been marooned in a field out by the Maine Mall ever since.
I am an ink-stained wretch and a lover of print, so I really hope my hometown papers survive the decline in readers, subscriptions and ad revenue brought about by social media. I’m sorry to say, however, that I recently cut back to a four-day-a-week Press Herald/Sunday Telegram subscription, both to save money and because the Press Herald doesn’t print on Mondays anymore. To get my newsprint fix that day, I pick up free papers like The Bollard (where I can read about scandalous behavior the mainstream media shies away from).
The major adjustment I have had to make since my weekly opinion column was canceled is not having an outlet for my pent-up rage in these days of political unrest and social malaise. The ignorance and prejudice in this country sometimes just seems overwhelming. Still, I am very slowly beginning to enjoy not having to figure out what I think about everything and everyone in the latest nasty news cycle.
I confess I did try last year to interest the Maine Trust in resurrecting my column of liberal ranting. But, alas, The Universal Notebook is closed. I console myself with the thought that, at the very least, my not-so-brilliant career did not outlive print journalism, as I once feared it might.
Edgar Allen Beem has been forced into semi-retirement in Brunswick.
