He hired her to be the paper’s editor and publisher, and she’s still at it today. It might have been purely a vehicle for advertising, but his friend Alice McFadden convinced him that good journalism would help sell ads.
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In May of that year, he started The Free Press, an alternative weekly in Rockland. In 1985, Brower conceived of a new way to expand his revenue streams: A weekly publication would allow him to consolidate ads for local businesses. He also designed and managed printing for coupon books, fliers, and chamber of commerce publications in the midcoast area where they settled. He became a wholesaler of batteries, cassettes, and other goods. When his then girlfriend, Martha-now his wife-got a teaching job in Maine in 1980, Brower went with her, and scrambled to make a living. “When I came to the college newspaper, it was like shooting fish in a barrel.” After he graduated in 1978, he moved to Martha’s Vineyard’s for a year and a half, where he sold ads at the weekly newspaper, The Grapevine. “I had sold pots and pans the summer before, which was the hardest job I had in my life,” he says. I hope that his plan would involve not interfering in editorial matters at his newspapers and not trying to maximize profits at the expense of the journalism.īROWER GOT HIS FIRST TASTE of the newspaper business in college, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, selling ads for the school paper. He owns newspapers and he’s making money. Newspaper industry consolidation is happening across the country, but nowhere is it happening quite like it is in Maine-almost completely under the watch of one person. When the internet came and the industry had to adapt, they couldn’t.”īrower’s consolidation of newspapers may well prompt media watchers to wonder whether the state is a bellwether for a new media-ownership model. “Where the newspaper industry went astray,” Brower says, “is they spent a lot of years being very greedy and arrogant, and it caught up with them. While Brower insists he’s “uniquely positioned” to help the industry in Maine navigate the tough road ahead, he acknowledges he’s previously had some antipathy for the press-for what he saw as bad business practices and a failure to plan for the future.
ICYMI: Meet the journalist tracking Digital First Media’s hedge fund owner 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. He provides printing services for the Bangor Daily News, the only daily he doesn’t own. “By being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he jokes.īrower’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. I ask how Brower ended up at the head of this domain. Maine is perhaps an unlikely place for a burgeoning newspaper empire: it’s known mostly for blueberries, lobster, and being home to a largely white, old, rural population. 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. Periodically his navigation system beeps, alerting him to trouble ahead-an apt metaphor for any owner in the volatile newspaper business. It’s late on a Thursday morning in August, and 61-year-old Reade Brower is driving south to an afternoon baseball game at Boston’s Fenway Park.
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