SAME Politico PLAYBOOK at the state level?
Maine governor paid the largest newspaper in the state to write favorable stories about public schools
Mills Admin Discloses Payments to Press Herald for Publishing Positive Articles on Maine Public Schools, DOE Spending
The Maine Trust for Local News has agreed to publish fawning coverage of the Mills administration in exchange for more than $115,000 in taxpayer dollars
Edward TomicBy Edward TomicSeptember 23, 2024Updated:September 24, 202437 Comments6 Mins Read15K Views
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The Mills administration has paid $120,000 to the Maine Trust for Local News (MTLN), the nonprofit that owns the Portland Press Herald and the Lewiston Sun Journal, to publish state-sponsored articles praising the Mills 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 (DOE) use of federal funding, according to state records reviewed by the Maine Wire.
[RELATED: Five Months Later, “National Trust” Won’t Say Who Funded Takeover of Maine Newspapers…]
According to the document, which disclosed the no-bid contract awarded to the nonprofit on Friday, Sept. 20, the Maine DOE will pay the “trust” a total of $117,300 for what the government described as a “marketing campaign.”
The payment will cover the publication and promotion of six articles portraying the Maine DOE in a flattering light. It’s unclear whether the state-sponsored “news” content will be written by someone from the Maine DOE or employees of the Maine Trust for Local News newspapers.
The taxpayer-funded “marketing campaign” will highlight the Maine DOE’s “use of federal emergency relief funding,” and will aim to “promote the best learning opportunities for all Maine students” and to “inspire ‘trust in our schools,'” according to the document.
The Mills administration described this initiative as a way to leverage the credibility and reach of the Maine Trust for Local News and their network of news outlets to generate “goodwill” toward Maine’s public school system.
“This campaign will utilize the authority of Maine Trust for Local News, which carries with the DOE’s constituents, to achieve these goals, resulting in an increase of goodwill for Maine’s public school system,” the Mills administration wrote in the procurement form.
The state-sponsored media will describe Maine as a “great place to teach and learn,” and will share the “success stories of Federal Emergency Funded programs.”
Neither the state nor the Maine Trust for Local News has disclosed the schedule for publishing the six “sponsored articles” online and in their publications, which include the Portland Press Herald, the Lewiston Sun Journal, the Waterville Morning Sentinel, and the Kennebec Journal.
In addition to the sponsored articles, the newspapers involved will also run paid advertisements to promote them on their websites. The contract runs from mid-August until the end of December.
Per the contract form, the Maine Trust for Local News is uniquely suited to be a purveyor of media favorable to the state government.
In fact, the nonprofit is so peerless in their role as the Mills administration’s de facto public relations team, according to the Maine DOE, that although they do not plan on running another similar marketing campaign, if they were, there “would be no one to compete” with the trust for future state-run media projects.
“Its 19 publications cover more areas than any other news organization and, combined with its three websites, have a larger Maine-based audience than any comparable outlet,” the Maine DOE wrote. “There is not another organization in Maine that can create a campaign of this size or nature.”
The Maine Trust for Local News, a subsidiary of the National Trust for Local News, is the nonprofit trust that last summer acquired several of Maine’s oldest news brands and daily newspapers, including the Portland Press Herald, Lewiston Sun Journal and Kennebec Journal.
On their website, under an “Our Guiding Principles” heading, the Maine Trust for Local News boasts that their local newsroom staff “are the only people who decide what stories to pursue, the timing of those stories, and their content.”
However, in this case, it appears as though the nonprofit is taking payment and direct instruction from the state government on what stories to publish, and the content of those stories.