Directories

Service Category

Community Newspaper

Business Description

We've made a successful community newspaper in an area that already has an award-winning newspaper. We truly embody community news rather than adverstiser-run news. The Bar Harbor Story is an alternative news and features site that focuses on the people, places, and events of Bar Harbor, Acadia National Park, and Mount Desert Island. Sometimes we even venture to the rest of Hancock County, Maine. Bar Harbor Story is currently a mostly self-supported publication. That just means that we take a financial loss every time we write an article. You’ll notice we post almost daily and sometimes twice a day. So, why do we do that? Why don’t we charge subscribers? We don’t charge because we want every person in the community who wants it to be able to have free access to their local news. That’s because we think information and knowledge is important to taking care of a community and to helping each other. And, apparently, we have a bit of a martyr complex when it comes to making money. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber and receive unbelievably comprehensive coverage of town meetings, heart-warming features, and probing news stories and some really lovely photos. It’s just us here, Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar, and we’re doing this to make sure local people have free access to information, and we are far from perfect and far from everywhere, but if you have a story idea or event you’d like us to cover, let us know! And if you’re worried about credentials, Carrie has reported for the Bar Harbor Times and Ellsworth American and edited the Ellsworth Weekly, winning numerous Maine Press Awards for reporting (features, spot news, arts, sports, columns) and photography. She’s also been published in many national magazines and on the fiction side is a writing coach, NYT and internationally bestselling novelist, and fiction editor. Shaun has been in law enforcement in Bar Harbor, is currently on the warrant committee, and has worked in the caretaking and restaurant businesses. Plus, he makes a really good Nashville hot chicken. So, come hang out! And let me know if there’s something you’d like us to cover! And thanks for being here with us and caring about our community, too. WHAT WE TRY TO DO We try to build community and not divisiveness. Though we know that sensationalism gets readers and we know that negativity does, too, and sound bites, and all those us-vs-them polarities that’s not what we’re about. We’re about community. Part of that is why we’re free and with no paywalls even though we work a ridiculous amount of hours to put out more than a million words of local news for you and with you every year, covering all the towns now on Mount Desert Island and Trenton because you asked us to. But it’s bigger than that. Whenever we can do a story that builds up a person or an organization? We will. Whenever we can get information, even if it’s something we don’t agree with, out there? We will. Whenever we can find a way to make our community better, even if it means writing hours and hours for little money, we do it. What we don’t do is be purposefully unkind. We won’t insult people’s hearts or their intelligence. Our role is not to mock. We admit our mistakes and we’re open about what we do. As you know, we are just two people and it’s very hard to proofread your own work. To make it worse, Carrie is a whole word reader and she’s all about whole word substitutions. When that happens, we admit it. We fix it. But it’s bigger than that, too. When we update a story, you’ll see that it’s updated. When we correct a story, we post that in the story and tell you when and why that correction happened. When a story is a press release, we tell you it’s a press release and we don’t put our byline on it as if we wrote it ourselves. If an organization asks us to hold a press release (you call that embargoing), we do that, too, even when others don’t do the same thing because it’s cooler to break a story than keep a promise sometimes, we guess. That’s not how we work. We are okay with not being cool. If we can’t get something verified, we don’t break the story. We have no one big advertiser that supports our salaries, physical products, and healthcare. We have a bunch of kind, small sponsors and subscribers who support our mission. We struggle over things like healthcare, property taxes, finding time for ourselves just like a lot of people on the island. Is being free and making sure we’re verified a great business model? Maybe not. But we aren’t about the news as business. We’re about the news as community, as civics, as a place where we document for others what’s going on locally, a place we mourn together, worry together, plan together, and celebrate together. When we have leads about stories but can’t get documented proof to support that, we can’t write that story until we do. That’s just not how we work either. We know that can be super frustrating sometimes. We write long stories a lot; we don’t always follow the typical inverted triangle news-story format; we freely offer links for you to learn more information; and we like semicolons. Because we aren’t confined by print pages or advertising-to-news ratios, we get to write long when we need to. Because we are digital, we get to give you links to provide you more information. We know news is about more than headlines and truths are even bigger than our own understanding of the facts that make the stories we print. We want you to make your own opinions, not be influenced by us. We trust you, our neighbors to make up your own minds, and we’ll try hard to give you the outside resources to do that. We don’t care if it means that you click away from us to look at those resources if it’s going to help you and help our community. We don’t care about awards, either. You’ll notice that we don’t compete for contests or awards. Honestly, we don’t have time for that and we also don’t want to focus our efforts on the expectations of what makes a good news organization from award-giving organizations (that are awesome). We want to make our own expectations of what it means to do a good job for our community. But also, with our giant staff of two, we just don’t have time. We will, however, cheer loudly for other news agencies and journalists who do get them. And we’ll be super proud of them.