CJR profiles Maine newspaper owner Reade Brower: focused on profitability, not at newroom's expense

Reade Brower

Though 61-year-old Reade Brower is most known for his Maine newspaper empire, he said he wasn't always a fan of the industry. Its financial slump came from "what he saw as bad business practices and a failure to plan for the future," Casey Kelly reports for Columbia Journalism Review.

"In less than a decade, Brower has acquired six of Maine’s seven daily newspapers and 21 of just more than 30 weeklies—a degree of newspaper consolidation unmatched in any other state," Kelly reports. "Brower’s properties include the state’s largest paper, the Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, as well as dailies in Lewiston, Waterville, Biddeford, Brunswick, and the state capital, Augusta. He provides printing services for the Bangor Daily News, the only daily he doesn’t own. His weeklies fill in the spread—ranging from the affluent coastal community of Camden, where Brower lives, to rural western Maine, which is dotted with economically depressed former mill towns."

Brower first got into the newspaper business as an advertising salesman, starting The Free Press, an alternative weekly in Rockland, as a vehicle for ads. But his friend Alice McFadden convinced him that good journalism was the key to selling ads, and he hired her as the paper's editor and publisher.

"Newspapers still present to you, both online and in print, a cohesive story," he told Kelly, adding that newspapers won't be sustainable if owners keep cutting editorial operations. That's perhaps the most succinct way to understand Brower: relentlessly focused on profitability, while protecting newsrooms.

That sounds good, but "It’s always a worry that these entrepreneurs are going to sell," Dan Kennedy, associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University and author of a book about modern newspaper moguls. "That’s why I hope Brower is turning a profit and is happy with that."

Tom Bell, a former reporter at the Press Herald, said Brower "has good intentions, but what happens in the next recession when revenues of all his newspapers are tanking all at once?"

John Christie, a former publisher of the Waterville Morning Sentinel and the Kennebec Journal, asked, "Is Reade Brower an angel or a devil?" He answered, "I think that he’s the only angel we’ve got, and we’ve just got to hope he doesn’t turn into a devil."