The Price Blethen is Still Paying
Unretired debt: The Blethens may be gone from Maine, but the effects from their ailing finances could linger on here for decades. Reporter Bill Richards has a piece on the Crosscut.com Web site in which he notes that last month, when the Seattle-based family sold the Blethen Maine Newspapers to MaineToday Media, headed by Pennsylvania newspaper publisher Richard Connor, the Blethens agreed to assume all liabilities in the company pension system. Richards writes that Connor “made the … retention of the Blethen Maine pension obligation a deal-breaking requirement.”
No wonder. Richards says the pension shortfall currently amounts to about $40 million, although it’s not clear how much of that relates to the Maine papers’ employees. Under federal law, the deficit must be paid back by 2011. If that doesn’t happen, it could affect the retirement accounts of ex-Blethen employees in Maine.
Richards also cites sources close to the negotiations who told him MTM paid between $30 million and $40 million for Blethen’s three Maine dailies, Web sites and weekly papers. If that range is accurate (and all indications are that it is), it’s approximately $200 million less than the $233 million the Blethens paid for the papers in 1998. Richards says the Seattle company still has about $90 million in debt remaining from that transaction.
Picture imperfect: Now it’s the Morning Sentinel’s turn to waste almost a full page on photos of new owner Richard Connor and assorted employees shaking hands with Waterville advertisers and local officials. The July 2 Sentinel offered readers this worthless content (it wasn’t posted online – fortunately), but couldn’t find space for political reporter Susan Cover’s article on the gubernatorial race or several other pieces of local news that ran the same day in its sister paper, the Kennebec Journal.
This fawning feature for advertisers has already infected Connor’s Portland Press Herald, and he’s said a page of photos will be a regular feature in all three papers. He’s also promised an increase in local news coverage, although to date, that hasn’t happened.
Unless the photos are it.
Legal limbo: The Associated Press and several Maine broadcast outlets have been sloppy in referring to Democratic gubernatorial candidate and state Rep. Dawn Hill as a lawyer. In fact, Hill’s license to practice law in Maine has been suspended, apparently because she didn’t keep up with continuing legal education requirements (which is strange, because legislators are exempt from those rules).
Hill’s campaign has made it clear in its press releases that the candidate no longer works as an attorney, but the AP and its TV and radio clients don’t seem to be paying much attention.
Last entry: The Westbrook Diarist has shut down. The hyper-local blog on all things Westbrook lasted about 18 months, but was eating up too much of founder John C.L. Morgan’s time, according to an interview he gave to the American Journal.
Like most blogs, Morgan’s was uneven, but at its best (which occurred surprisingly often), it was informative and insightful, an excellent example of what citizen journalism can achieve. It’ll be missed.
Dam mistake: Speaking of Westbrook, it must have been a long time since a Maine Public Radio reporter ventured there. For much of June 29 and 30, the network kept telling its listeners the state Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife was making “S.D. Warren” in Westbrook build a fish passage on one of its dams on the Presumpscot River. S.D. Warren hasn’t owned a dam in Westbrook for the better part of a decade, since it sold its mill and associated properties to Sappi Fine Paper North America. According to other news accounts, it was Sappi that was ordered to improve river access for the fish.
Another Down Easter goes down: Lorie Costigan, the editor of this Web site, was laid off by Down East Enterprise Inc. earlier this week in a move management blamed on sluggish advertising revenue. Editorial responsibility for Web content will fall, at least temporarily, to Down East editor-in-chief Paul Doiron. An administrative assistant’s position in the company’s book-publishing division was also eliminated.
Down East also laid off seven people in March in a cost-cutting move.
Al Diamon can be e-mailed at aldiamon@herniahill.net.
The views expressed on this Web site are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views of Down East Enterprise or its employees.
Change at PPH
Reviewing the Portland Press Herald web site and print edition, I can no longer find any reference to Opinion Page Editor John Porter; so – presumably – his position has been eliminated. And yet Naomi Schalit still retains her job as OP Editor of the Kennebec Journal according to that web site’s masthead. So … an urban area of 75k doesn’t need a dedicated OP Editor, but a backwater like August rates one? Doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s also disappointing to note the discontinuation of the weekly open meeting of the Editorial Board. I realize this was a Jeanine Guttman policy, but I always thought it was a good one.
One change that has been
One change that has been made recently is a definite improvement, and that's the appointment of one editor to oversee the PPH, the KJ and the Sentinel.
Under previous regimes, the PPH had an executive editor and the KJ/Sentinel had a separate executive editor. This arrangement perpetuated decades of sibling rivalry between the two organizations, even though they were owned by the same company. PPH editors looked down their noses at their "country cousins" from Augusta and Waterville. Meanwhile, editors in those central Maine cities resented the PPH's smugness and condescension, and reacted accordingly. The end result was sporadic cooperation at best and open hostility and mindless duplication at worst. If shared oversight finally buries such foolishness, the result will be an improvement for readers and staffers.
Hello?
If you read this blog, then you would have seen Al's posting last week - quoting the new editor for the PPHMSTKJMS - that said Porter's position would be not be filled.
It's one thing to postulate in public about the goings on at the papers, but it's another thing to postulate about information that's already been reported, in the same digital arena which it's been reported.
Enough of the rumor-mongering about what's happening with these papers. What's done is done. Al is doing a good job talking about what is happening.
Do we still have to focus on what might happen, the possible intrigue, or the office politics?
On another note, I can't help but believe that any publishing outlet that decides its web staff is expendable as a budget cut is myopic. I visited this site before it had an editor; it was pitiful. Now it's one of my daily must-reads. I know many others who feel the same way.
If this site becomes a stepchild to the magazine, ignored, unloved and untended to, the management and senior editors at Down East will have done themselves, their readers and their future a disservice.
Dude.
The disservice has already been done.
Disservice.
Are you referring to the Maine Today website, or Downeast.com? I think the parent poster was talking about DownEast in that portion of his remarks.
Disclaimer: I actually know Paul Doiron, though I have not seen him for quite a few years.
Not a Guttman policy
The weekly editorial board meeting was Porter's initiative, and I believe he got the idea from George Neavoll. Of all the moves that Connor has made, getting rid of Porter is by far the most perplexing. Yes, he was at times a bit arrogant, but he really knew what he was doing. And if you went to some of those Thursday meetings as I did, you could see that he was a genuinely nice person who cared about readers and what they had to say.
Even his supporters ...
The fact that even his supporters call Porter arrogant says a lot. Good riddance.
I agree with 4:44 a.m. that
I agree with 4:44 a.m. that the absence of an opinion-page editor at the Press Herald is odd, but the solution to that problem is not to eliminate Naomi Schalit's job as well. For one thing, Schalit is the opinion-page editor for two newspapers, the KJ and the Sentinel. Moreover, the poster's city-versus-backwater description of Portland and Augusta is a stretch. If Augusta is a backwater, then Portland is a quasi-backwater. It's not New York or Los Angeles or Chicago, for crying out loud.
Typical Portland arrogance
Like 11:03 said. . . the whole state is a back water, but some Portlanders seem to think they're urban sophisticates