In an era of widespread consolidation, community newspapers across the country continue to close their doors. Biddeford’s Journal Tribune is just one of many, folding after 135 years of publication. The closure comes at a time when more than one in five local newspapers has shut down over the past 15 years, leaving many communities without a reliable source of local news and information.
Founded in 1884, the Tuesday-through-Saturday newspaper is the only daily publication devoted entirely to covering the Biddeford-Saco area. The Journal Tribune’s failure also is the first major setback for Brower, an independent owner who has purchased six of Maine’s seven daily newspapers and more than a dozen weekly publications since 2015.
He said the decision was made to cease publication of the Biddeford newspaper because his media conglomerate, Masthead Maine, has other newspapers serving the same market. “People should be looking at this as a smart move that will keep us in business,” Brower adds.
“We really want to focus our efforts in the areas that have the most opportunity for success and growth, so to continue to kind of prop up the Journal Tribune was really just going to take resources away from somewhere else. “It was a really difficult decision, and we considered everything. Should we further reduce days of the week? Should we go digital-only? But in the end, the thing that just (made) the most sense was to just stop publishing,” commented Masthead Maine CEO Lisa DeSisto. She is also the publisher of the Journal Tribune, the Press Herald and other Maine newspapers.
In addition, longtime Journal Tribune journalists Dina Mendros and Tammy Wells will join the staff of the Biddeford Courier, a weekly community newspaper also owned by Masthead Maine that is distributed on Thursdays, DeSisto added. Journal Tribune Executive Editor Ed Pierce already was planning to retire Oct. 11, she said.
DeSisto further said the Journal Tribune’s declining readership was evidence that the community no longer found it to be a “must-read” publication. “We’ve made significant (cost-saving) moves – we have one finance department for all three groups; there’s one circulation department,” she said. “We use our purchasing power as leverage with all of our vendors to get better rates. So we’ve been really aggressive in doing that, and we’ll keep doing it. We’ll never be done.”
The Journal Tribune’s final day of publication will be Oct. 12.
