When The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting began publishing The Maine Monitor in 2020, the publication became the latest vehicle for the mission the nonprofit had pursued since its founding in 2009: addressing Maine’s need for investigative reporting as the state’s legacy newsrooms cut capacity.
Today, local investigative reporting is still the Monitor’s core mission. But a 16-town listening tour of the state last summer surfaced demand for another kind of local journalism: coverage of elections and public meetings.
“Mainers [bemoaned] the loss of hyperlocal journalism and the insights that they used to get into the civic governance of their town and their community,” said executive director Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm. The Monitor’s team heard anecdotes about people going to vote in local elections only to leave without voting because they didn’t understand the issues on the ballot. “Particularly in western Maine, we were hearing: We just don’t have local journalism anymore,” she said. That got the newsroom’s leadership thinking: What role could the Monitor play in meeting that need?
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