Ex-Portland Press Herald Editor Unleashes On New Ownership’s ‘Lack Of Watchdog Journalism’

A former longtime top editor of Maine’s largest legacy newspaper is blasting its latest iteration as an “embarrassment.”

Cliff Schechtman, who oversaw the Portland Press Herald newsroom from 2012 to 2021, is quoted in a Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism analysis of the paper’s new “nonprofit” ownership.

“I’m simply embarrassed by what the Press Herald has become,” Schechtman says. “The standards have dropped dramatically, and the productivity is a shadow of what it was.”

He is among several legacy media execs quoted in the piece published this week by Medill’s “Local News Initiative.”

Meanwhile, the article also quotes the new CEO of the Press Herald’s parent company, the National Trust for Local News, as saying the trust may have bought too many papers.

CEO Tom Wiley, who’s been on the job just a couple of months, suggests that his predecessor may have let expansion get the better of her.

“Maybe,” Wiley speculates, ex-CEO Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro pushed the Colorado-based trust to buy too many papers before it figured out how to run the ones it already owned.

“It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback it,” he said. “It’s easy for me to say Elizabeth overstretched, but the real answer to that is ‘maybe.’”

Wiley’s current strategy suggests an understanding that the trust may have expanded too quickly, according to Liam Scott, who wrote the Medill piece.

Scott’s critical analysis comes in the wake of several that have been done since the trust bought a string of Maine newspapers in 2023, including the Press Herald and two other dailies.

The first, and seminal, retrospective was done by the Poynter Institute titled “What Went Wrong At The National Trust For Local News.”

Since buying the Maine newspapers, the trust has laid off nearly 50 staffers and reduced printing at several small weeklies.

Schechtman claims the flagship Maine paper has, under the trust’s tutelage, started “prioritizing stories that will get clicks over watchdog journalism.”

But in reality the Portland Press Herald lost any verve it ever had when its original longtime owner, the Gannett family of Maine, sold the paper in 1998 to a Seattle-based publisher.

The paper, which later underwent several ownership changes, has never recovered its original reputation as the state’s dogged source for local news.