Secret Salary For New “Non-Profit” Boss At Maine’s Largest Newspaper

By Ted Cohen/The Maine Wire

The “non-profit” group running Maine’s largest newspaper is refusing to disclose the salary of the new CEO, amid executive-compensation issues that have nagged at the company.

The National Trust for Local News announced it’s hired a new CEO to replace the former trust boss who quit in the wake of questions about her huge salary raises.

But the new CEO, Tom Wiley, wouldn’t even discuss his salary with the paper that he is now overseeing.

Can’t make it up, as we say in the trade.

But not surprising given the controversial history of high salaries at the non-profit company.

The company’s founder and then CEO, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, received a salary of $370,000 as of 2023, the year she took over the Maine paper.

But both Wiley and trust board chairman Keith Mestrich earlier this week “declined to provide Wiley’s salary in an interview,” the Portland Press Herald reported in announcing Wiley’s hiring.

They “said it would be made publicly available in tax filings,” the always-reliable, hard-hitting Portland Press Herald reported.

The trust has been spinning its wheels since buying the Press Herald and a string of other papers in Maine in 2023.

The group recently announced 50 layoffs amid widespread spending cuts.

Not to worry, according to Wiley, who gleefully told The Buffalo News – where he is currently president and publisher – that once he’s running the trust’s 20 papers, “the money will come pouring in.”

Funny, in 2023 when Lee Enterprises upended the Buffalo newsroom with $1 million in budget cuts three years after buying the paper from Berkshire Hathaway, publisher Wiley – much as he did Monday when he refused to talk about his salary at his new Maine job – went mute, referring questions to his bosses.

Now all of a sudden he’s claiming he’s against “downsizing local staffs” – a direct quote from the very same Buffalo paper on Monday where he stood by, not only two years ago when Lee Enterprises did that very thing, and last fall when it made even more newsroom cuts.

So now, despite the budget challenges facing Wiley at the national trust, Maine’s largest newspaper only briefly mentioned them in announcing his appointment, never quizzing its new boss about whether he would restore any of the 50 jobs it just lost due to fundraising shortages.

The paper also never explained that Shapiro left the job vacant when she resigned after The Maine Wire’s coverage of the 217 percent salary hike she’d received in a two-year period.

The paper’s shallow coverage was equalled only by an obsequious piece by the Nieman Lab at Harvard, which went into full-blown celebration mode over Wiley, calling him “a sincere and well-liked news executive.”

The lab couldn’t stop with that gem, adding that he has “a reputation for operational acumen and people skills.”

Yet, judging from public reaction to Wiley’s appointment, Press Herald watchers aren’t drinking Wiley’s Kool-Aid.

Mike Violette of Waterville pointed out on Facebook that Wiley “won’t be based locally and you’re going to pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars while you’re going broke. Makes perfect sense.”

Indeed, Violette is spot on – Wiley “won’t be based locally.” He told the Buffalo paper he’s going to be running the Maine paper from Buffalo, New York.

“Wiley underscored the importance of local journalism,” the Buffalo paper reported with a straight face.

“I don’t plan on scaling back my community involvement in Buffalo,” Wiley said with an even straighter face in the Buffalo interview announcing he’d be the new CEO overseeing the Maine daily.

In a related development, that paper’s former owner, Reade Brower, says he’s not yet done with the Portland Press Herald.

Brower, who sold the paper to the national trust two years ago, says he’s coming back in a different role – managing the paper’s printing press in South Portland.

As part of that arrangement, the Maine Trust for Local News – an arm of the national trust – will begin printing the Ellsworth American, which Brower owns along with five other weeklies.

That means that for the first time in its 174 years, the American won’t be printed in Ellsworth.

The shutdown of that plant – the last remaining newspaper printing press in eastern Maine – means the loss of 10 jobs.

Under Brower’s management, the South Portland plant will also begin printing his other weeklies, including the Midcoast Villager “newspaper of record for Knox and Waldo Counties” that is based in Camden.