Reade Brower

Notable work and positions

The Ellsworth American - owner
The Mount Desert Islander - owner
The Midcoast Villager - owner
MaineToday Media / Masthead Maine (former) - owner; publisher of the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram

Biography

Reade Francis Brower is a Maine newspaper owner who, over nearly a decade, came to control most of the state's daily and weekly newspapers. Raised in Westborough, Massachusetts, by his adoptive parents, he graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1978 with a degree in marketing and settled on Maine's midcoast in the early 1980s, where he founded the weekly shopper The Free Press in 1985. Brower built a printing and publishing business from there, acquiring Rockland's Courier Publications in 2012 and, in 2015, purchasing MaineToday Media - publisher of the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram - from financier S. Donald Sussman. Further acquisitions, including the Sun Journal's parent company in 2017 and two Vermont dailies in 2016, made him the owner of six of Maine's seven daily newspapers and more than two dozen weeklies by 2018. In 2023, Brower sold five daily newspapers and seventeen weeklies to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News, retaining six weekly papers - The Ellsworth American, The Mount Desert Islander, The Courier-Gazette, The Republican Journal, The Camden Herald and The Free Press. Four of those weeklies merged in 2024 to form the Midcoast Villager. He has generally stayed out of the day-to-day editorial operations of his papers.

Career highlights

• Founding The Free Press 1985 · Launched the Rockland-area weekly that became the foundation of his publishing business.
• MaineToday Media acquisition 2015 · Purchased the publisher of the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, beginning his consolidation of Maine's daily newspaper industry.
• Sale to National Trust for Local News 2023 · Sold five daily papers and seventeen weeklies to the nonprofit trust, while retaining and later merging his midcoast weeklies into the Midcoast Villager.