The Maine Trust For Local News, which this week ran not only one but two stories on maple sugaring, has now published a piece about its hard-hitting journalism.
The paper says it won “several New England Newspaper & Press Association awards in the reporting, photojournalism, advertising and special section categories.”
The prizes were part of the 2025 New England Better Newspaper Competition announced at the group’s annual convention.
There’s a reason they call it the “better newspaper competition’ – because winners need to get a whole lot better.
That was the same convention at which the keynote speaker talked about what a dying industry liberal legacy papers are.
The icing on the cake is the Press Herald reporting that its “staff also took home first place prizes in the Best Sponsored Content categories for advertising.”
“Staff” in this case includes Democrat Gov. Janet Mills, who paid the paper thousands of taxpayer dollars to publish material favorable to her administration.
“The Maine Trust for Local News has agreed to publish fawning coverage of the Mills administration in exchange for taxpayer dollars,” Ed Tomic, a Maine Wire reporter, wrote nearly two years ago.
Tomic said Mills paid $120,000 to the Maine Trust for Local News, which owns the Portland Press Herald, to publish state-sponsored articles praising her administration’s use of federal-education dollars.
“The articles are intended to bolster ‘goodwill’ toward the state’s public school system and the Maine Department of Education’s use of federal funding, according to state records reviewed by The Maine Wire,” Tomic reported.
Press Herald writer Leslie Bridgers, meanwhile, took home a second-place award for her columns in the “Serious Column” category.
Bridgers should be thankful it was only second place, lest she have to explain how her columns can be considered serious.
Her most recent “Serious Column,” for instance, was a piece Sunday on the trust’s own print manager visiting towns across the state.
That “Serious Column” took up the entire front page in the Maine/New England section.
But despite that bellringer she also had time this week to pen a piece about going grocery shopping.
Portland staff writer Gillian Graham won third place in the Human Interest Feature Story category for her story, “They’re the last cobblers left in Maine – and they’re busier than ever.”
Cobblers.
Not Mills and her scandal-plagued administration doing such things as raiding the state’s emergency bank as a slush fund to send checks to voters.
But cobblers.
“Reporter” Megan Gray took third place in the “Racial, Ethnic or Gender Issue Coverage” category for “The first transgender woman to compete in Miss Maine is a farmer who loves to dance.”
Why only third place?
Who won first place for writing about a biological high-school male deciding he wants to compete in girls’ sports?
Come on, people, spill!
Facebook Scorecard:
✓ The Maine Wire – 150,000 followers
✓ Portland Press Herald – 93,000 followers
