‘Substantial cuts’ on horizon for Maine’s largest newspaper conglomerate, says top source

A well-connected New England media analyst says he’s “heard from serious people that substantial cuts may be coming” to the company running Maine’s biggest newspaper chain.

Dan Kennedy, who teaches journalism at Northeastern University in Boston, is self-admittedly close to the power structure of the “non-profit” Maine Trust for Local News.

Kennedy even acknowledged being invited to a trust fund-raising blitz that featured a book he and his partner were selling.

So he’s pretty cozy with his sources, including Lisa DeSisto, the woman he calls his “professional friend” who late last year suddenly quit as the trust’s CEO.

Kennedy, who writes under the blog “Media Nation,” is telling his readers to take a look at a new piece by a Poynter Institute reporter who did a helicopter analysis of the problems the trust has had since it bought the Portland Press Herald, its flagship Maine paper, in 2023.

“It looks as if the bosses and board members face a formidable set of problems,” Rick Edmonds of Poynter Institute said.

“The trust had become out of sync with the mantra that news organizations work best when they are owned and run by those closest to the local communities,” Edmonds observed.

Since the trust bought the Press Herald, along with a string of weeklies, it has endured a tsunami of top-level resignations, including Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, CEO of the National Trust for Local News, the parent company and money behind the Maine trust.

In his setup for the latest problems facing the trust, Kennedy – a journalism professor – attentively addresses her as “Dr. Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro.” (Incidentally, the Associated Press style book, the grammar bible for reporters, allows such a first reference for medical doctors only.)

“Hansen Shapiro is featured in our book and has been on our podcast,” Kennedy said, underscoring his unusually close access. “DeSisto is a professional friend of ours and we were the guests at a fundraiser for the Maine Trust.”

He describes those disclosures as “my usual caveats.”

When Kennedy refers to “our,” and “we,” he’s referring to him and his podcast co-host, “my research partner,” Ellen Clegg, who before retiring in 2018 worked 30 years at the Boston Globe, the last four as opinion-page editor.

After DeSisto quit in December, Kennedy wrote about how close he and Clegg are to her.

DeSisto, still on the Press Herald’s payroll at the time, helped them sell a book they were promoting at the same event DeSisto was using as a “fund-raiser” for the newspaper – just weeks before she resigned.

The title of the book? “What Works In Community News.”

Honest.

So, make no mistake – Kennedy, Clegg and DeSisto are joined at the hip, giving Kennedy and Clegg coveted front-row seats to what’s going on behind the scenes at the troubled Maine Trust for Local News and its parent company.

“Ellen and I both have previous connections with Lisa — she and I were colleagues in the 1990s at The Boston Phoenix, where she was an executive in the advertising department, and Ellen worked with her after she moved to a top business-side position at The Boston Globe,” Kennedy wrote at the time.

“Lisa has been a source of stability and continuity,” Kennedy said when he learned she had stepped down. “There’s no question that she’ll be deeply missed.”

Edmonds, meanwhile, no slouch himself but nowhere as near to the trust’s power elite as Kennedy and Clegg, said neither Shapiro nor Marc Hand, the trust’s chairman, would talk to him for his article.

“Doctor” or not, Shapiro (she has a PhD in organizational behavior and sociology) resigned last month in the wake of a whopping salary raise.

Shapiro’s pay hike came just before she started cutting news budgets, ousting several longtime Maine culture columnists and scrapping entire sections of the Sunday editions.

Kennedy’s dire prediction for an even bleaker future for the paper comes in tandem with the piece by Edmonds entitled “What Went Wrong at the National Trust for Local News?”

Edmonds believes the trust’s business model may be “badly flawed.”

“There is a basic strategic problem at the trust, which has effectively strayed from its original mission,” he said.

In Kennedy’s opinion, Edmonds is suggesting “that one reason the national trust may have run into trouble was that it morphed from a philanthropic venture that acquired newspapers into a nonprofit organization that saw its mission as actually running them.

“I suspect we’re being going to be hearing a lot more,” Kennedy added, “and I’ve heard from serious people that substantial cuts may be coming.”

Steve Greenlee, who was the Press Herald’s chief editor when the trust bought it, told Edmonds that when he resigned last year he did so “at a time of great stress.”

Though Greenlee wouldn’t specify for Edmonds exactly what he meant, it appears he may have seen the storm clouds forming before he resigned to take a job at Boston University.

DeSisto was the next to go, followed by Shapiro.

Then, just last week, the head of the Maine trust’s Lewiston Sun Journal, publisher Jody Jalbert, quit after more than 30 years with the paper.

None of the four top-level executives who either chose to resign or were pushed out will shed any light on why, beyond offering boilerplate farewells.

Based on Edmonds’ reporting, Kennedy speculates that the national trust leaders under Hand, its chairman, unexpectedly went from being “hands-off” managers to autocrats, prompting Greenlee’s reluctantly leaving the stage “in an especially painful way.”

DeSisto, who oversaw the hiring of Carolyn Fox to succeed Greenlee as executive editor – albeit with far greater management authority than Greenlee ever had – followed him out the door.

Then Shapiro herself walked, and the next to go was Jalbert.

Hand, who co-founded the national trust with Shapiro, is running it for the time being with Keith Mestrich, its treasurer. 

Editor’s note: Ted Cohen is a former long-time staffer for the Portland Press Herald.