The former top executive who walked out of the Portland Press Herald shortly after the Maine Trust for Local News took over the bulk of the state’s newspapers has found a new gig policing content for the state’s pliable mainstream media.
Lisa DeSisto is now running a shadow government – an outfit otherwise known as Press Forward, a project of the left-leaning Maine Community Foundation.
As “senior advisor,” DeSisto’s role will be to “build a broad-based advisory panel to identify and prioritize the best ways to reimagine and expand access to local reporting,” according to the foundation.
DeSisto joined what was then MaineToday Media in 2012, and stayed on with the news organization through two ownership transitions and two acquisitions.
“As I leave, I do so knowing the leadership team is as strong as it has ever been,” DeSisto wrote in a column announcing her resignation published in the Press Herald a year ago. “This team is filled with the energy, ideas and passion to lead the organization into the future.”
That would be the same “team” filled also with the propensity to mask its sources from you, the readers of Maine’s largest dailies.
For those unaware, those dailies have not just once but twice in the last week published pieces sourced by ill-defined lobbying groups.
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Ill-defined because the Portland Press Herald and its sister publications failed to clearly explain to readers that two stories it published criticizing so-called “conservative advocacy” were actually sourced from leftist groups.
The “team” apparently forgot that journalistic ethics require credibility as the cornerstone of believable reporting.
To remind them of the obligation, the conservative Parents Rights in Education clapped back at a Press Herald story critical of parents trying to get their say with Maine school boards.
Allen Sarvinas, the parental group’s state coordinator, called out the Press Herald for masking its liberal funding sources as a “hyperbolic smear campaign against everyday Maine parents who dare to stand up and demand transparency and accountability while enforcing their inherent parental rights.”
In an effort to blare its own brand of liberal shade, the Maine Community Foundation says it “applied and has been selected by the nonpartisan philanthropic initiative Press Forward to become one of 36 independent chapters nationwide.”
Importantly, the group will be “emphasizing a shift in narrative: moving away from journalism’s financial crisis and toward the community benefits that local news delivers.”
The group in July announced it would be spending $22.7 million to finance “local news” outlets “to meet the urgent challenges newsrooms face.”
DeSisto will be joined at Press Forward by “advisory council” members Jeanne Bourgault and Judy Meyer.
Bourgault, CEO of an outfit called Internews, “worked internationally in countries undergoing dramatic shifts in media and political landscapes,” according to the World Economic Forum.
She previously was with the U.S. Agency for International Development, including three years at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow as a “strategic advisor” for media and community development programs in post-war Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro. That game came to a halt when the Trump administration dismantled USAID.
Meyer is, yup, yet another refugee from the new and improved Maine Trust for Local News.
She resigned earlier this year as executive editor of three of the Press Herald’s sister daily newspapers.
Meyer and DeSisto were among a passel of execs who went stage right – either by their own choice or by somebody else’s – after the trust bought the newspaper group in 2023. Now they’ve returned to ensure Maine’s media stays faithfully left.
