The state’s leading northern-Maine paper’s annual report shows an anemic following – far behind The Maine Wire – despite an advantage in legacy and workforce size.
Graham Pollard, who is The Maine Wire’s digital media editor, compared Bangor Daily News’ readership to the Wire’s.
Pollard’s source for Bangor’s following comes from its so-called 2025-2026 “Impact Report,” published by Bangor CEO and President Jennifer Holmes.
“This is the report they send to donors and potential donors to try to sell themselves as to why you should give the Bangor Daily News your hard-earned money,” Pollard said.
He quoted Holmes from the report, “Over the past quarter-century we have reinvented ourselves from a 400-person daily print newspaper reaching 80,000 readers each week to a 100-person digital first newsroom reaching more than 900,000 people each month across Maine and beyond.”
Pollard said that “it’s a pretty safe assumption this combines all their platforms – the social media, their website,” etc.
“So what I’m going to do is put up The Maine Wire’s last 30 days just on Facebook,” he said, using a graphic. “The viewer information is really what we’re looking for here.”
The Maine Wire’s monthly viewers on Facebook alone: 4.2 million.
The Maine Wire currently has seven full-time employees and four part-time employees brought on in roughly the last six weeks, for 11 total employees.
In addition to Facebook, “if you combine our Twitter, our Instagram, our X, our Tik Tok, our website and our newsletter we’re really reaching, like, 6½, 7 million people a month on average,” Pollard said.
With a tenth of the employees the Bangor Daily News has, The Maine Wire is reaching seven times the amount of people.
“It’s almost like if you report things the people are actually interested in and you don’t shill for the Mills administration, people will actually pay attention to what you’re doing,” Pollard concluded.
In a post titled, “RIP BDN,” Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson said, “You’d think that with $2.4M in no-bid contracts from Janet Mills – via a sister company that takes all kinds of taxpayer money – they’d be able to do something interesting. But they’re only interested in lazy left-wing pap.”
The Bangor Daily News was founded in 1889, which is 135 years ago.
The Maine Wire was founded in 2011, making it 15 years old.
Monthly scorecard:
√ The Maine Wire 7,000,000
√ Bangor Daily News 900,000
Bangor’s pathetic showing against The Maine Wire ranks along with its soul sister to the south, the Portland Press Herald.
The Maine Wire has 176,000 Facebook followers compared to Portland’s 93,000.
The young Maine Wire eating the state’s entrenched dailies for lunch – as enjoyable as watching a brown bear doing the same to a salmon.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The 4.2 million figure cited is individual Meta accounts reached. When it comes to total views on Facebook over the last 30 days, the Maine Wire is at ~46 million
It’s also impressive that the MW and Steve Robinson have been featured in national outlets. Thanks also to Maine rapidly becoming a national joke due to rampant fraud, wokeness and the Platner debacle.
The Maine Wire is , as far as I am concerned , one of a very few things that there are to be proud of , still left in Maine .
Job well done. Most of the public is starved for the truth. We start our day with WVOM and with MWTV.
Congratulations and Thank You!!! It is so refreshing to read actual investigative journalism in the state of Maine!!!
Thank you Maine Wire!
reporting real news can have an impact
How come the part time no benefit employees aren’t in the picture?
4.2 million views a month on FB sounds like A.I bots on patrol.
A more accurate comparison would have been to use the same metric as BDN.
I only come here because it’s free and I can bash Trump and Janet and the mass murdering jews . BDN doesn’t do that. You have to pay to play at BDN.
It’s much much appreciated what MW is doing for Maine. It’s not a surprise to me that you are heads and shoulders above the corporate news providers. Hope you guys are making the powers that be squirm a bit. Well, maybe a lot.
Don’t let this go to your head. Besting the BDN is like a greyhound racing a slug. Slug seems appropriate. I still love ya though 🙂
Reading the BDN is like watching “The View”, only the whacky left believe what the spew!
If the Bangor Daily News was part of a baseball ⚾ game it would be a ☔ Rain Delay.