Bangor Newspaper Company Has Received More Than $2.4M from Mills Admin for “Public Affairs”

Bangor Publishing Company — the company that owns both the Bangor Daily News (BDN) and a lesser-known marketing agency — has received more than $2.4 million from state agencies since Gov. Janet Mills (D) took office in 2019, according to a review of contracts filed with Maine’s procurement office.

The payments to Bangor Publishing Company are not regularly disclosed by the company’s newspaper arm but are available publicly via the state’s vendor payment disclosures and its procurement record websites.

State financial records show that payments made to either Bangor Publishing Company, Pulse Marketing Agency, or Pulse Marketing LLC began almost immediately after Gov. Mills entered office and totaled more than $2.4 million as of fiscal year 2024.

The Maine Wire’s review of those contracts sheds new light on the murky and ethically questionable dynamics that arise when a newspaper company is simultaneously reporting on state government and profiting from lucrative contracts with state agencies.

The contract documents also raise questions about whether Bangor Publishing Company’s marketing firm received preferential status while bidding on government contracts because of its partnership with the nominally independent newspaper operation.

A search of Maine’s procurement archives did not reveal any payments to the Bangor Daily News’ parent company during the years when Republican Gov. Paul LePage was in office. Likewise, the vendor payment records for those fiscal years don’t show any payments to the newspaper company. The flow of taxpayer money to the Pulse Marketing appears to have begun almost immediately after Mills took office.

At first, the flow of taxpayer money to the media company began small. Procurement records show a March 2019 agreement in which the company accepted $3,300 for a logo redesign from a state agency. But that would become pocket change compared to the six-figure contracts the Mills Administration handed the media company after the arrival of massive federal funding tranches tied to COVID-19.

In 2025, the Mills Administration has already handed the BDN’s marketing firm three contracts worth $406,625, $46,300, and $101,000 via the Maine Department of Labor (MDOL), and a $38,390 marketing agreement via the Maine Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

In Nov. 2024, Maine’s Bureau of Information Services inked a massive $711,449.34 deal with Pulse Marketing tied to a government-sponsored public affairs campaign.

In addition to the eye-popping amount of taxpayer money that has flowed to one of Maine’s largest newspaper companies, the process by which the state negotiated those some of the contracts raises questions about how Pulse Marketing was chosen.

On March 31, State Auditor Matt Dunlap, a Democrat appointed to the position by Democratic lawmakers, released a blistering audit that found significant deficiencies and material weaknesses in how the Mills Administration has handed out no-bid contracts. Dunlap noted in the audit that the lack of controls around non-competitive procurement for goods and services could potentially make Maine liable for private lawsuits, as well as investigations by the federal government since many of the awards in question were backed with federal dollars.

The findings of the audit were alarming enough that the Senate Republicans sent letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi requesting an investigation into the mismanagement of taxpayer dollars by the Mills Administration when it comes to no-bid contracts.

Yet as newsworthy as the audit and subsequent calls for an investigation were, Pulse Marketing’s news arm avoided writing about Dunlap’s audit and its findings — except, that is, for re-printing a single Maine Public story that essentially said of the audit “nothing to see here.”

Now, it appears that Pulse may have been among the beneficiaries of the Mills Administration’s slipshod approach to handing out government money, including federal dollars linked to Covid-19.

Specifically, Pulse Marketing may have won a six-figure contract that emerged from a Request for Proposal (RFP) process in which they did not participate. While state emails and forms related to the contract imply that there was a competitive bidding process to award the $395,900 marketing contract to Pulse, records from the referenced RFP show that Pulse never participated in the RFP as a marketing agency.

That discrepancy falls squarely within the dozens of issues Dunlap flagged among the significant deficiencies and material weaknesses uncovered during his audit of Maine’s 2024 state spending.

The payments from a Democratic administration to a newspaper broadly regarded as left-leaning by Maine readers also raise questions about the newspaper company’s independence and the benefits Mills and allied Democrats obtained from spending lavishly on marketing contracts, including during Mills’s 2022 re-election fight against former Gov. LePage.

Jennifer Holmes, senior vice president at BDN, said in an email that the businesses provision of marketing or advertising services to politicians or administrations “does not imply a political leaning or favoritism.”

“Just as we have for decades received campaign money from Republicans and Democrats in exchange for advertising services, we receive money from the state of Maine in exchange for marketing services,” Holmes said.

“The reason our marketing agency did not win state contracts under previous governors is that we did not have a marketing agency until late 2018,” said Holmes.

Holmes did not respond to follow-up inquiries pointing out that Pulse Marketing did not receive any state marketing contracts prior to becoming part of the BDN.

BDN’s news operation could plausibly say that Pulse Marketing is an entirely separate entity from the news side of Bangor Publishing Company. However, if that’s true, there’s no evidence of it in the documentation associated with their state contracts.

Quite the contrary.

A Marketing Firm with a Newspaper Arm

When the Mills Administration agreed to pay Pulse Marketing nearly $400k via MDOL for a public affairs campaign, the marketing gurus’ coworkers on the news team were arguably the key feature of the proposal.

The contract records, including a pitch document the company prepared for the state, suggest a deep partnership between Pulse and BDN that is hardly ever disclosed on the news or opinion pages of the BDN. Pulse leans heavily on its access to the BDN — including access to its audience and access to BDN staff — to provide value to clients, like the Mills Administration.

The pitch from Bangor Publishing Company outright states that choosing Pulse over other marketing agencies will give the government agency the benefit of BDN’s reputation for publishing news and access to its audience. The Pulse marketing plan includes outreach “through our relationship with the Bangor Daily News, a respected information provider on employment issues and current events.”

On the agreement, Pulse’s point of contact is listed Jennifer Holmes, the longtime VP of Bangor Daily News, alongside her @bangordailynews.com email address. A key member of the Pulse team listed in the contract materials is Jo Easton, the Bangor Daily News’ director of audience. Her BDN biography describes her work as “engagement journalism.”

The plan also highlights how the firm will leverage BDN’s existing community relationships to recruit participants for video interviews and promotional events aimed at boosting interest in healthcare jobs, in line with the Mills Administration’s goal of filling those jobs with “New Mainers.”

The sharing of personnel works the other way, too, with former BDN editor Anthony Ronzio serving as Gov. Mills’ communications director. According to government salary records, Ronzio joined Mills’ office in 2020 and received compensation in 2024 worth $134,182 as a Deputy Director. He’d previously worked as a “Director of News & Audience” at BDN from 2013 to 2017, according to his LinkedIn.

The involvement of Easton and other BDN personnel in Pulse’s client-facing campaign raises critical questions: To what extent are BDN newsroom staff influencing or contributing to Pulse’s marketing work? And how independent can the newspaper be when its corporate sibling is under contract to carry out government messaging? And critically, what stories are written — or, perhaps more importantly, not written — in order to protect lucrative government contracts?

Government-Sponsored Public Affairs

The BDN isn’t the first Maine media outlet to be caught taking large sums of money from the Mills Administration.

Last year, the Maine Wire reported exclusively on a controversial no-bid contract handed to the Maine Trust for Local News (MTLN) which paid the newspaper company $117,000 to publish propaganda articles written by government employees with the intention of promoting initiatives from the Maine Department of Education (MDOE).

Unlike the payments to the parent organization of the Portland Press Herald, the contracts with BDN’s parent company do not require the publication of government-written content in the pages of the BDN or on its website. But they do require the BDN’s marketing side to become de facto agents of persuasion on behalf of Mills Administration projects.

According to the service contracts, the Mills Administration has paid the Bangor newspaper company to craft public affairs campaigns related to health care worker recruitment ($359,900), a virtual career center ($397,625), “Equity Nano Videos” ($101,000), and the State of Maine’s “Constituent Portal” ($711,450).

One of the newspaper company’s first six-figure contracts with the state sheds light on how the media firm was paid to engage in government-sponsored public affairs work around the politically charged topic of healthcare worker shortages and health care vaccine mandates.

According to publicly available contract documents, the MDOL awarded the firm a $395,500 contract in late 2021 to run the “Care for ME” campaign, a recruitment effort targeting immigrants, new Mainers, and other “underserved” populations for entry-level healthcare jobs. Setting aside questions of why the government was involved in subsidizing job recruitment for one choice industry as opposed to any other industry, the timing of the contracts suggests a political calculation aimed at minimizing the deleterious consequences of Mills’ widely panned vaccine mandates.

The funding for MDOL’s contract with BDN came from the American Rescue Plan Act, one of President Joe Biden’s signature spending bills. The nominal purpose of the marketing scheme was to mitigate staffing losses expected to arise in late 2021.

The timing of the contract—proposed in Nov. 2021 and signed in Dec. 2021—means the taxpayer-funded marketing campaign to recruit direct care workers began three months after Mills mandated that all Maine health care workers receive the experimental mRNA injections, then touted as immunizations against COVID-19. The deadline for compliance was originally set for Oct. 1, 2021, but it was delayed to Oct. 29, 2021, due to heavy resistance from health care workers.

The ironclad mandate helped drive the shortage of health care workers which the Mills-BDN marketing campaign would later seek to resolve. As a direct result of the mandate, thousands of Maine health care workers resigned from the industry. The mandate led to a class-action lawsuit from health care workers alleging it violated their constitutionally protected rights, a suit that languished in court until Mills rescinded the order. But rather than ease the mandate to keep health care workers on the job, the Mills Administration’s answer appears to have been spending federal tax dollars with the Bangor newspaper company to create a website and a Facebook page.

It’s unclear how many people were hired as a result of the Mills Administration transferring nearly $400,000 in ARPA funds to Bangor Publishing Company. The resulting campaign — originally pitched as Care for ME — became “Careers with Purpose”. The initiative remains active, though it boasts only 474 followers on Facebook and doesn’t disclose that it’s a government-controlled account. Recent posts to the page include sponsored content published with the Portland Press Herald. One post discloses that its paid content but doesn’t disclose who is paying, i.e. the taxpayer.

The Mills Procurement Free-for-All

Mainers who rely on the BDN for their news would have no way of knowing that State Auditor Matt Dunlap excoriated the Mills Administration over its use — and abuse — of no-bid, non-competitive contracts. However, details tied to contracts received by Pulse Marketing highlight many of the issues Dunlap raised in his audit related to lack of adequate controls and the lack of scrutiny of no-bid spending.

The original MDOL contract (CT20221124*1297) indicates via the Procurement Justification Former (PJF) that it was competitively bid, and the email references RFP 201807151.

However, Pulse Marketing did not participate in that RFP as a marketing agency. The firm won a listing as a pre-qualified vendor for the state as a copy-writing firm, but it didn’t even request a listing as a marketing agency.

The only companies that entered the RFP referenced in the above email were Bradley Brown Design Group and Colehour + Cohen Inc (C+C)

Here are the publicly available documents related to the BDN contract with MDOL: