The Maine Trust for Local News has notified a slew of its western Maine freelance writers they are off the grid.
“Unfortunately, we will no longer be accepting freelance writing support from most of our contributors,” Marla Hoffman, lead editor of the trust’s western Maine group of papers, wrote to the freelancers.
Hoffman said the papers, recently acquired by the 501(c)3 National Trust for Local News, are “navigating an increasingly difficult economy and a changing industry.”
[RELATED: Maine Trust For Local News Announces 49 Layoffs, Reduction of Print Publications…]
The notices emailed Nov. 21 to the freelancers in western Maine are similar to those received earlier this year by independent writers who were working for Maine’s largest daily, the Portland Press Herald.
“We are reducing expenses across all of the papers in our network, including our dailies,” Hoffman said. “One of those steps is trimming and in some cases eliminating freelance budgets to try to find savings where we can.”
[RELATED: George Soros, Pierre Omidyar Fund Org That Now Controls Most Maine Newspapers…]
Bill Pierce, one of the victims of the latest freelance swath, said he actually stopped writing months ago – because he wasn’t getting paid on time.
“I was owed for last January and June’s submissions and was not paid for them until late September,” Pierce emailed Hoffman.
“I certainly understand that you are ‘navigating an increasingly difficult economy and a changing industry,’” he told Hoffman, according to a copy of the email shared with the Maine Wire. “However, many of your once abundant and loyal customers have not left just because their budgets got tighter or that they would not shift to the digital format.”
The reality, he argued, is that the lead publications “have become nothing more than left-wing newsletters.
“The bias has not been contained to the editorial section but has run amok in the editing that does not include some of the numerous misadventures of our current leadership in Augusta,” Pierce added.
In 2023, the National Trust for Local News acquired the Portland Press Herald and other papers then-owned by Reade Brower and Maine Today Media, including the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Brunswick Time Record, the Kennebec Journal, and the Waterville Morning Sentinel.
At the time, publisher Lisa DeSisto said, and Press Herald Report Rachel Ohm relayed, that the National Trust for Local News would reveal who funded the purchase of Maine’s largest newspapers.
However, that never happened.
Instead, it fell to a journalist from Semafor to reveal that billionaire left-wing mega donors George Soros and Hansjorg Wyss, a Swiss national, were behind the purchase.
The National Trust’s front in Maine, the Maine Trust for Local News, has never disclosed who is paying the bills. Or, more accurately, who’s not paying them.
