The new CEO of the parent company that owns the Portland Press Herald apparently wanted to quickly leave his imprint on the embattled National Trust for Local News, selling off 21 papers one day after he took the helm.
One day.
It took Tom Wiley 24 hours – he started on the job Monday and sold the papers Tuesday – to decide that the business model of the National Trust for Local News was unsustainable.
The news of the shocking sale was broken not by the Portland Press Herald – but by NiemanLab.org.
The Times Media Group, to which the papers were sold, “has a history of reducing roles in local newsrooms,” Nieman reported.
The trust bought Maine’s largest newspaper in 2023, along with a string of the state’s weeklies from Reade Brower.
Not long thereafter the trust said bye-bye to National Trust CEO Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro in the wake of questions raised in several stories by The Maine Wire about huge salary raises she’d accepted in the midst of layoffs.
The Trust, which does business in the Pine Tree State as the Maine Trust for Local News, soon became the focus of a piece by Poynter.org headlined “What Went Wrong With The National Trust for Local News?
Plenty, judging from the latest “news,” which consists of the alarming decision to jettison nearly two dozen newspapers in Colorado, the national organization’s headquarters.
Weeks ago, the trust laid off 50 people at the Portland Press Herald, just before Wiley told the paper he was “excited to help our newsrooms produce even more great local journalism.”
The National Trust described the move to sell the Denver-area publications to Arizona-based Times Media Group as a restructuring that will “allow the organization to maximize its long-term impact and sustainability in the state,” according to the Bangor Daily News.
Will Nelligan, the national trust’s chief growth officer, described the sale as a way to “reduce our footprint in greater Denver without reducing local journalism there, all while positioning ourselves to grow in the parts of Colorado where the need for our unique model is greatest.”
“Unique model” for sure. The national trust calls itself a “non-profit” for a reason.
