Reade Francis Brower is a media owner known for owning a majority of the newspapers in Maine during his tenure as owner of MaineToday Media. His network of owned papers was described by The Maine Monitor as a "near-monopoly".[1]
Prior to owning newspapers, Brower was an entrepreneur who started several companies, including an auto catalog and direct-mail company that advertised to 600,000 Maine households each week.[3] In 2015, Brower bought MaineToday Media from financier S. Donald Sussman.[4] He continued purchasing Maine newspapers;[a] in 2017, he was the owner of 24 papers in Maine, including four of the state's seven daily newspapers.[5] In 2018, he had acquired six of the seven daily papers in the state (the exclusion being the Bangor Daily News).[6]
On March 30, 2023, he announced he was looking to sell or take on investors to Masthead Maine, the successor to MaineToday.[7] On March 31, Bangor Daily News reported that he owned five dailies and 25 weeklies, and six specialty publications.[8] He was 66 at the time.[9] On July 10, 2023, Bangor Daily News reported that Brower had sold the five daily newspapers and 17 weeklies he owned to the National Trust for Local News, a non-profit.[10]
He also owns 6 weeklies that were not included in the 2023 sale: The Ellsworth American (Ellsworth), The Mount Desert Islander (Bar Harbor), The Courier-Gazette (Rockland), The Republican Journal (Belfast), The Camden Herald (Camden), and The Free Press (Camden).[11][12] Those six papers had united under the company MaineStay Media in 2022.[13]
