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?
The answer they’ve landed on is Monitor Local, a “hyperlocal civic news service focused on communities in Maine that have little to no journalism bringing attention to what’s going on in their local government” and giving readers the information to engage as local citizens. It’s the latest example of a statewide news organization expanding coverage by honing in on community-level, hyperlocal news needs (some metro dailies have done this too).
Monitor Local launched last November in four counties in downeast and western Maine, where the need seemed most acute based on the listening sessions. (The Monitor had already zeroed in on those areas a few years ago as part of its effort to better serve the state’s rural communities with its in-depth reporting.)
The outlet hired veteran local journalist and editor Judy Meyer to lead Monitor Local; in addition to reporting herself, she edits a network of freelance correspondents working out of communities in those counties. (Relying on community members as freelance correspondents has appeal for many local newsrooms, especially in rural areas.) The nonprofit Journalism New England provided $50,000 in seed funding for Monitor Local and trained a couple of Monitor Local correspondents through its 12-week “Career Lab,” a model not just for producing local journalism, but for making community residents into local journalists.
Since November, Meyer and Monitor Local correspondents have covered the runup to and outcomes of Town Meetings, a major county budget controversy, and lots of housing and zoning debates. A correspondent broke a story about a pier collision that prompted a Coast Guard investigation. Another reported on Bowdoin’s proposal for a student campsite in Kingfield, where residents then signed a petition opposing the campsite; the college just withdrew the application. Similarly, Meyer reported on the Maine Library Commission’s proposal to impose new state requirements that might have forced small, volunteer-run libraries to close — the backlash led the proposal to be postponed and dropped, and commissioners are gathering more feedback for a new proposal. Monitor Local’s budget controversy reporting inspired the Monitor to take a broader look at other county budget processes.
Monitor Local reporting is included in the Monitor’s daily newsletter and rounded up in two weekly regional newsletters on Saturdays. Since launching Monitor Local in November, the Monitor has seen 14% growth in its Downeast Local newsletter and 26% growth in its Western Local newsletter, Schweitzer-Bluhm said. Readers have also discovered Monitor Local’s reporting through word of mouth, community Facebook groups, and Reddit. Like the rest of the Monitor’s reporting, Monitor Local coverage is frequently republished in other local newspapers across the state; so far in 2026, 19 news outlets have republished Monitor Local reporting “for a total of 261 instances,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said.
Some counties where Monitor Local is active still have a local newspaper, like The Quoddy Tides in Washington County, one of the outlets that has republished the Monitor. “We’re not trying to replace other newspapers,” Schweitzer-Bluhm said. “We’re trying to provide a news service that serves readers in those communities, and that allows hyperlocal papers that do exist to use their resources in other ways that we’re not going to do.”
That generally means sticking to a civic lens, so Monitor Local doesn’t cover topics like school sports or business openings. However, a correspondent did cover the winner of the Maine State Spelling Bee, an eighth grader from Machias. That story was “an outlier,” Meyer said, “but it was such a spectacular win for a student in Washington County where students often struggle, so I saw it as a reflection of the positive learning environment in [winner] Tristan Singh’s public school, which ties directly to school district priorities and educational attainment — often driven by budgets decided by school boards and approved by voters. So, maybe a stretch, but certainly grounded in civic life.”
The nonprofit puts cohorts of community reporting fellows from local newsrooms through a 12-week journalism training program, with weekly 90-minute online classes taught by journalism educator Katina Paron. The fellows report and write stories that Paron edits, typically over multiple rounds, and the stories are published by the fellow’s nominating newsroom (similar to some student journalism partnerships with local newsrooms).
“We spend a lot of time going back and forth to make sure we can get the best story that we can, and do our best not to tell them what to do, but to ask questions and to point out things that we don’t understand or don’t make sense or where we think it could be stronger to help them make decisions,” O’Mara said. She estimated fellows put in about 10 hours of work per week on average; they’re paid a “learning stipend” of $300 a month for participation in the program. Fellows have included students, grandparents, and ages in between.
The Career Lab’s ethos is similar to the Documenters program adopted by many newsrooms. “I would not try to tell you that our 12-week program will teach somebody how to handle enterprise journalism or a big investigative piece,” O’Mara said. “I will tell you that it teaches them how to cover town council, city hall, school board, the business that closed on Main Street and the new one that’s coming in, the handicap access to beaches, the things that make a town tick and help a town have all of the great outcomes that we know [local] journalism brings” like lower borrowing costs for local government, a greater sense of connection, higher civic participation, and even better public health outcomes.
“I think [journalism] is a big club, and we should open the doors, and there’s room for different people with different skill sets,” she added.
Meyer’s concern going into the Career Lab program “was that people who were interested in doing this were bringing an agenda with them,” she said. But Schweitzer-Bluhm said the people that want to work for the Monitor have generally understood that impartiality is core to the publication’s mission.
The Career Lab’s second cohort just wrapped up; over three months, four fellows produced 31 stories for Maine newsrooms. Two of those fellows are Monitor Local correspondents. Meyer plans to recruit more fellows for a Career Lab cohort starting in September.
Melissa Razdrih told me she began reading the Monitor soon after moving to Maine in 2021. She had done some work for political blogs like FloridaPolitics, contributed a few stories to The Quoddy Tides, and considered starting her own local blog, but responded to the Monitor’s Career Lab application instead. She completed the community reporting fellowship in May.
The cohort heard from guest speakers, including a lawyer who discussed defamation and working reporters from newspapers including the Portland Press Herald. But Razdrih said she learned the most when she had to post a lengthy correction on her first story. She was reporting on solar streetlights. “I didn’t know at the time how complicated energy is in Maine, and so I kind of stepped into this really complex issue with a lot of nuance that I didn’t understand, and the context that I used in the article wasn’t as applicable as I thought it was,” she said. “That was a very humbling experience.”
Since then, Razdrih has developed a beat around Washington County agriculture; one of her stories about a proposed farm bond in the state’s congressional session was republished on the front page of the Portland Press Herald.
Razdrih estimated she spends 20 to 25 hours per week on reporting, aiming to file two stories per week. She’s paid per story by the Monitor as a freelancer, and balances that work with teaching art on Mondays at her daughter’s school.
“In Maine, we’ve got a lot of writers,” Razdrih said. Both for those with writing backgrounds and those who have other professional experience, she thinks teaching the basics of journalism to people already in the communities where local reporting is needed “makes so much sense.”
