 everybody and welcome by show Friday p.m. My name is Luigi Scarcelli. Today's guest is Chris Busby from the Maynard magazine at formerly the Ballard magazine. That's right. Yeah, so it's great to meet you. Great to meet you. Thank you for having me. Sure, sure. So let's jump right in. I like to do that with some biographical information. So you weren't born in Maine. No, I'm a Virginian actually. I was born in Virginia. But shortly after that I moved to upstate New York and I grew up around Rochester, New York, that area with the Great Lakes. And I moved to Maine in 1998 and started writing with Casco Bay Weekly, Portland's original homegrown alternative news weekly. So that was my introduction to town. I think you said you were the editor over there. Is that 2000? Yeah, I had graduated from the Audubon Expedition Institute just prior to moving up here in 98. And before that I had done some freelance work for the Boston Phoenix. Mostly working on listings. I didn't really do any writing for them. But that experience was certainly helpful getting the listings editor position at Casco Bay Weekly when I moved here to Portland. And I worked my way up to the editorship of CBW in 2001. And the following year the owner of the paper, Dodge Morgan, fired myself and the rest of the editorial staff over a disagreement around budgeting and typical story in the newspaper business. The owner wants to slash the reporters and the reporters push back on that. And in this case he pushed back harder and we all went off the cliff. But unfortunately so did CBW. Not long after that that paper disappeared. I actually moved back to Rochester, New York for a year and worked for an alternative weekly called City Newspaper right around that time. But then I returned to Maine and briefly worked actually for a year with the Portland Forecaster. Which had just begun then in 2004. But all along I knew I wanted to start my own publication in the spirit of Casco Bay Weekly doing alternative journalism. And that was the Bollard which was launched in the summer of 2005. Okay, right, right. So the Bollard was originally, that was the title before the Maynard. And the Bollard, what is a Bollard? Just for those of us who don't know what it is. Yeah, Bollard it's a word my old mentor at Casco Bay Weekly, Al Diamond, the great main political columnist had taught me. And it's just one of those words that if you live in Portland, once you know what one is, you see them all over the place. Bollards are the posts you'll find down on the waterfront that the boats throw their ropes over when they're in dock. It's not a cleat, which is much smaller. You have to actually go and wrap the rope around a cleat, right. But a Bollard is a post a little wider at the top so the rope doesn't slip. And it's also a word that refers to all the concrete barriers that keep cars from driving onto a sidewalk or a public square. So Portland has a lot of bollards of both types. And so I thought that was a neat word. It's also, of course, a pun. It being a post as the name of a newspaper or something, I thought, well, if it was in a nautical town like Portland, you would be a bollard, not a post, right? And it's it's almost one of those things that you see Portland all the time. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. But before that, you just kind of blends in. People don't know. Yeah, right. So big kind of posts. In those days, you wanted to do something a lot more like the Village Voice, a lot more like an alternative newspaper. At that time, Casco Bay Weekly was no longer. And was the Boston Phoenix. I know that kind of fizzled out. It's now in a new incarnation, which we can talk about at some point. It's not exactly the same as it used to be. So at that point, there was kind of a missing part of the landscape. Is that correct? Yeah, I think so. The Portland Phoenix was around in 2005. It subsequently went through a bunch of ownership changes. But, you know, I guess, and I did do some freelance writing for the Phoenix before I started the bollard a couple pieces. But if I'd felt as though that was a good publication or publication, I wanted to work with, you know, more seriously, I certainly would have done that. But no, I wanted to be out on my own and to have something truly independent. Because that was at the time part of the whole media group, the Phoenix Media Group had radio stations and other things. So they started getting more corporate if and they probably had been since the beginning. Sure, absolutely. I think you wanted to start out kind of quarterly monthly. You didn't want to be the guy doing the community news where you're on like, let's figure out what just happened at, you know, station number five or whatever. You wanted to be, you know, having time to really get stories. Absolutely. Do things a little more in depth, for sure. And, you know, our initial goal was always to be monthly, but we didn't have the money to pay a printing bill in the beginning. So the bollard was initially solely online at thebollard.com. And we built up a reputation through the bollard. And that was a lot of fun because actually in those days, we could do those little breaking news stories. You know, having worked for a weekly for years, the opportunity then to be online and to scoop the press Herald, for example, you know, that's a thrill because back in the CVW days, you might get a story, but you had to bite your knuckles and hope that someone didn't find it before your paper came out right there in a week. But so we got a lot of neat scoops back in the online days of the bollard, including breaking news of development interest on the main state peer, which is something that took up the city's business for years afterward. Some major players trying to hone in and take our public peer for their private tourist interests. But anyway, in 2007, we started publishing quarterly in print. And we did four quarterly issues, and then reached our goal of monthly publication in June of 2008, just in time for the world's economy to collapse. Yeah, right, right. 2008 economy. And then that's when you kind of had you had to reconfigure and transform a little bit at that point. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, the numbers that we projected in terms of revenue and what we could do, obviously, that changed quite a bit, given the circumstances. Something we've also tried to balance and not haven't always done a great job of is the online versus print content. Because, you know, we're monthly in print, but there's still that temptation to do as much online as you can and get these scoops still and do all this extra stuff. And, you know, I think that's waxed and waned with us over the years, depending on our staffing level. But ultimately, you know, at least I've realized that it's just not economical for us to run a full fledged online website and a monthly print publication. Almost all of our revenue comes from the print ads. So online stuff doesn't really make us any money. It's fun to do. It's good to do. You know, we've broken some big stories only online. But yeah, it's been a balancing act. What's your philosophy of journalism? You're not afraid to step on toes. You're not afraid to it. A lot of journalism currently is is, you know, who you agree with. You'll, you'll go after whoever and tell me about that, that philosophy. Yeah, we're politically independent. We're not associated with any party or, you know, political ideology. We will kind of go after or expose maybe as a better word, bad actors in any political party. You know, whether that's Shelley Pingry early on, we exposed her relationship with the hedge fund Titan Donald Sussman. That was actually one of our very first cover stories in the summer of 2008. We've certainly gone after our share of right wingers and the far right and Republicans like Susan Collins. And then you have a cover story like this month's piece about Zen Ben Mikkeljohn, a leader of the mains green independent party who did some bad things in the past and we exposed that. So no, we either there's no one we won't kind of go after. It does seem as though kind of the print news in general is slow, right? It's not what it used to be because of television. And then television got usurped by the internet. I mean, it's all moved in such different directions. I mean, a lot of daily papers are probably going out of vogue, right? So out of business, out of business, right? And so the kind of the monthly thing already is probably a smart idea, right? Because it gives people a chance to and because it's a free paper, there's subscription types of things online. I think it this is it gives you a chance to write the stories that you like, you know, and kind of come up with things. What's the group of people that work on your staff? Are they all freelance people? Yeah, group core group. Yeah, we have an art director. And then we have an ad salesperson. In addition to that, there's about a dozen regular freelance contributors. And they run the gamut from Phoebe Colbert, who's one of our columnists. She's a young woman in her in her early, very early 20s now who writes a great column called Kid Number Two. Okay. Samuel James, the great blues musician, writes a column for us called Racism's Leo Hilton, who is currently incarcerated at Mainstay Prison writes a very powerful column for us called Shining Light on Humanity. But one of the things to that alternative journalism in general is really good at doing and something that I'm very proud of as an editor, is bringing on writers who ordinarily wouldn't be able to work in journalism. That could be, for example, tackle box Billy Kelly, who writes a column for us about fishing, but it's more about life in general. He's kind of an old salty dog. You know, when I pick up his, I have to pick up his column. He's not online at all. He gives me his handwritten stuff on the back of scraps of paper and I go and type it in and stuff. No, very few, if any other editors would ever put up with a situation like that. You know, he's not a professional writer. Right. But he's got a voice. And so I'll go out of my way to do that. Similarly, Kenny Wayne Beak, who writes the Transient Series, that's a long memoir about his time as a homeless person on the streets of Portland. You're just not going to find those writers in other outlets in Maine that I know of. So, you know, we're really proud to have their work in there. And again, you don't have to be a polished professional writer to contribute to Maine. In addition to our regular contributors, too, we do accept freelance just one-off submissions from people. If you like their writing. Absolutely. Yeah, and it gives them a chance. So, I mean, it's a venue for really anyone in Maine. We exclusively publish work by Maine writers, I should say, on Maine topics. We don't cover national news or regional news or anything like that. But yeah, if you live in Maine and you're a good writer or an illustrator, we publish comics and artwork as well, then we're open to that. And I think as we talked about as well with it, the idea that because you're not beholden to big corporate interests, I mean, most year revenues from advertisement, but it's correct. And most those advertisers are small, local businesses. So, you are accountable to the public. Yeah. But you're very accountable to kind of your peers. You know, so if you do something, if you guys kind of step in it as journalists, they're going to say, hey, we're not going to advertise with these guys, because this is like they're doing crazy stuff that we don't like. But for the most part, these are the folks, small businesses, music establishments, right? Because you guys try to keep current with who plays music. Absolutely. Yeah, we do music reviews. We have a whole section in the back called Highlights, which is about arts and entertainment listings, things that are happening there. And yeah, we're totally supported by the mom and pop businesses in the community. And you know, it's been interesting for me as someone who is always an editor and never a publisher, the process of selling ads and meeting each month with these ad clients, these small business people. Originally, I thought, you know, this was really something very removed from my writing life and my journalism. But in point of fact, it's not at all. Because when you talk to these people, you learn an enormous amount about the community, about what's going on. Like, if I didn't have the obligation, but the need to go in, and I actually enjoy this, of course. But you know, if I didn't have the chance to go in and talk to all these people around the region, and you know, especially in Portland, but we have advertisers all over every month, I wouldn't be as good of a reporter because that's ear to the ground stuff. You're always picking up little things. And that's interesting because that's actually like leads to my question, which probably could be the answer to it, which is like, how do you find a scoop? How do you find a new story? I mean, it's being an independent paper. Although I don't know how bigger papers do it either. I mean, you have a hotline or something like that. But is that just word on the street? You find out something like you did the piece about the kind of the slumlord guy who owns a lot of properties. And that's the interesting part is everybody thinks it's going to be Joe Soley. But it's another guy. Jeff Price. Right. Do you find this out just because you talk, you just happen to know a lot of people and they say look, this is Yeah, it's just being in the community, going out and about talking to people. Sometimes we will definitely get tips. You know, sometimes it's someone I know, sometimes it's not. It's an anonymous thing. Follow up on those other times it might be a subject that the mainstream media has covered, but they've missed a whole angle to it. There's, you know, something about it they're not talking about. You know, a good example of that would be we did a story a few years ago about bath ironworks and the enormous amount of money that's wasted there and so forth. But, you know, the coverage of B I W and the mainstream media is unfailingly praising and, you know, rah, rah and all this stuff. Well, there's a whole other tale to tell about even the very existence of this company and, you know, how they interact with politicians and and the public and all this kind of thing. So, you know, that's that's a story we would do that you wouldn't see elsewhere, but it's about a subject that is. And because that's yeah, those big papers are they don't want to kind of bite the hand that feeds them. It's all of those kind of things that they're kind of in the same, you know. Yeah, they've all got they've all got the same consensus. You know, they're they're, you know, generally OK with the status quo in terms of militarism, poverty, drug addiction disease, they're not really willing to to really challenge the fundamental assumptions that cause these problems. Right. So in some of that, too, you know, some of it is very insider. You know, the there are a lot of former reporters for papers like the Portland Press Herald who are now the spokesperson for bath ironworks main medical center. They the big companies are often their friends. You know, these are the reporters friends who've gone on the revolving door. Absolutely. Just like in government with lobbying and lawmaking. So, you know, there's a lot of that that goes on. You know, I'm not saying that necessarily changes any particular story, but there's a friendliness to it. And I will also say that if as a reporter, you keep poking the bear and you're known as someone who goes after some of these bigger corporations and bigger powers in the state, you're not going to get that job opportunity to make the leap from the Press Herald to a better paying job with Hannaford. These are all real life examples, by the way, or B.I.W., it's a remain health, because they're going to look at you as like kind of a troublemaker and like, you know, someone who doesn't go along and get along. Right, right. You know, there's no chance that I'm ever going to be hired as a PR person. Let's just put it that way. But, you know, given the shrinkage in the newsrooms around the country and in Maine, it's been no different. A lot of times reporters don't feel like they have much choice, but to leave a very difficult, low-paying job as an actual journalist and become a spokesperson for a major moneyed interest. Yeah, because I mean, I think that that's that. I mean, obviously that's it with a lot of these local news, the pay, it is not. I mean, it's barely a career, I suppose, for a lot of these folks. And then how do they branch out from there? I think you talked about, I mean, I know we talked about the Shelley Pingree, but you told me before a few stories that were really interesting about like some missing hiker. Yeah, just tell us about regalus of a few of the stories for the people out there who haven't had a chance to read all the past articles. I do recommend go online, right? The Bollard, well, now be the main or main or news.com is the website for the current publication. And you can find previous online. If you want to go back and read articles and the Bollard is also Bollard.com is also still live. So, you know, there's some stories that haven't been transferred over, but all that stuff's there. And yeah, so it's on there. So if people are curious, but just tell us a couple of those. Yeah, well, that hiker story was interesting. This is a good example, too, of how we get stories. I knew this guy around town. His name is Hutch Brown and his family had a camp in northern Maine up in Carabassum Valley region up there. And he saw a story on the news about a hiker who was missing on the Appalachian Trail. And Hutch happened to know because he's a curious person and had a camp in the area that there is a very secretive navy training base right in the area where she disappeared. Her name, it was Geraldine Largay, Jerry Largay. And this base was called a sear base and basically all of the branches of the military have sear bases. It stands for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. And essentially what they do is they bring soldiers not only from the United States but other countries to train there and they create a mock torture situation. So they're sort of like hiding in the woods and then they're inevitably caught and they're brought to a fake torture facility, water boarded, given all, you know, a lot of the torture techniques that the US has used. With the idea of training them to withstand those techniques, were they to be captured by, you know, a quote unquote enemy combatants, right? Well, it's not so hard to figure that things could go a little A-wall at a facility like that where, you know, you've got people in a very realistic torture war game. And here's a woman who again disappeared right where that base is. So it was a series of I think at least four articles that Hutch and I wrote together, research together. What is sear? What is this base? Who is Jerry? What caused what? And that was one of the more riveting pieces. People really followed that. Readers really followed that. We ultimately did solve the mystery of that. What had happened was Jerry had gone off the trail to try to get a cell phone signal. So she was at a part of the wilderness there that no one ever thought she would go to, you know, high up on a mountain. I mean, like a mountain top or hilltop in that area. But that's why she wasn't found. Everyone's saying, oh, she must have just gone off the trail a little bit. You know, it was a massive search, the biggest search ever in Maine's history. And they never found her. They found her three years, her body three years later. So she fell off maybe the hill? She actually had stayed on the hill, but she had gone. She was an older lady and she had a bad sense of direction. She was on some psycho active drugs or, you know, really like prescription drugs that psychoactive. But drugs for things like anxiety and so forth that if you go off of, she didn't have a long supply. So things can happen there. Just these are all aspects of the story trying to understand how she wasn't found. But yeah, she was in her own campsite. She wasn't injured. She had just thought that technology was going to save her and it sadly didn't. So that was a big lesson there. But anyway, that was a very powerful story. We also ran a very long series about Jake Sawyer. He was an infamous motorcycle outlaw, bodybuilder and kind of career criminal. But really a sweetheart of a guy for all that. Cliff Glantt wrote that series. It was called Jake Sawyer's story. And that ran for years actually in the Bollard. So that was really good. More recently, we had a piece last summer where we exposed that the Proud Boys, the violent hate group, has been meeting right up the street from us here at Matthew's pub on Free Street. They had a monthly meeting there and a bartender who worked there had noticed this and had blown the whistle and told us about it. And so we wrote that story that had a big impact. But then again, that's another example of where the mainstream media and our colleagues here in Maine, you know, they're just totally cowardly and they totally drive the ball. They won't touch it. They won't touch it. I mean, I don't know why you wouldn't. I mean, other than the possibility of some death threats. But, you know, they'll let me and my source dangle out there is the ones who are, you know, blowing the whistle on the Proud Boys while they sit near cubicles and, you know, re-type press releases. So I have very little respect for other reporters and editors in this town. That always leads me to that question. I mean, does this style of journalism, does this, do you get worried? Do people get upset? I mean, it sounds like... People get upset. Yeah. I mean, just, you know, a few months ago, we had a thug named Frankie Fornier who was doing muscle work for the slumlord Jeffrey Rice who you mentioned earlier and also for a bookie in town, Steve Martigan, who we wrote about and exposed. He decided on Facebook he wanted to maybe indirectly threaten myself and my family. And so, yeah, I mean, that stuff happens with some frequency. You know, am I really worried? No. You know, I mean, most of the, you know, if someone like Frankie, right, you know, he's posting this thread on Facebook, you know, so it's like public threats on social media, you know, take it seriously. What you got to look out for is the silent ones who creep up on it. Right. But yeah, I mean, most of these people are also cowards and so, you know, they're all talk, you know, they, you know, but, you know, no. So in other words, the short answer is no, I'm not worried at all. Is, was that the bookie thing that was on Forrest Avenue? Yes, he owned a bunch because he was also a major property owner, Martigan, real scumbag. And he'd been at this for decades. And you know, this was a question also where you had Portland police officers gambling with him. They absolutely, I mean, if the Portland police didn't know that he was the biggest bookie in town, then they're the most inept police department in the history of the United States. They absolutely knew they had officers who were gambling with him. It was the feds who came in and had to bust him because a police force like Portland is inherently corrupt, right? You know, there's no way that they didn't know about Martigan, but they didn't want to bust him. They don't want to get their hands dirty. They're more interested, you know, kicking homeless people, sleeping on the street or hassling black people. And what was the so the federal authorities then actually the FBI had to come in because, you know, I mean, they didn't say so many words, but it's like, yeah, clearly the locals have been corrupted by this guy, you know, and he's again, I'm talking about decades, like a career 40, 50 years of, you know, making book illegal gambling houses, all sorts of other stuff on the side. And, you know, the Portland police department, I mean, like, how do you miss that? I mean, you know, and I knew this began here to the ground. And here's some great advice for for young reporters, go to bars. Yeah, okay, go to bars and drink at the bar. And I'm not talking about a table by yourself, go drink at the bar and talk to people. Because that is where you get really the best information. That's the place other than maybe, you know, a church or the ball field, you can get, you know, certain, you know, meet certain people, but to meet like a random group of people, locals, and to be able to be in a situation where you can have an extended conversation with them. That doesn't even happen in coffee shops, per se bars are special in our, in our culture as places of this gathering. Luckily, I like to drink too, you know, and I like our local bars, especially our neighborhood bars. So I've gotten an enormous amount of stories just by, you know, being at the bar, meeting someone talking, people from all different walks of life, you know, and, you know, that's a great way to find out what's really happening in the community too. That's where you hear about the bookie. And you hear about the slum lord, right, you know, so that's where the information is of what's really going on. So my, my last couple of questions, I mean, where do you, because you do seem to have your ear to the ground about Portland, where do you see Portland in five years from now? I mean, we're going in a lot of great directions in some ways, but it's also going a lot of directions for some people. I mean, it's getting pricier to get an apartment around here or to buy a house. It does feel like it's going in a very good direction for some people, but I don't know if it's for everybody. Yeah, I don't see anything changing. I don't see any big ideas, you know, coming out of the current council or the leadership there. Mayor Kate Snyder has been a ghost. I don't know where she is. I don't know what she's saying, I don't know what she believes in. And I'm a pretty avid news consumer. She's been an absolutely like absent leader. I don't know, she's just again, she's invisible. And then, again, these new progressives that are on the council, where are the real progressive ideas? You know, part of the problem with Portland is that, you know, our ability to raise money is very limited, you know, it's limited to like the property tax and some fees and so forth. So if you really wanted something like affordable housing, per se, like the current council and the past councils, they just do little things around the edges. They require a private developer to do some extra affordable units or some tax credits here or there. None of that is ever going to get us out of this crisis. And it should be obvious to everyone that it's that it's just rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship. What you really need is big investment at the state is particularly the federal level to build housing, build public housing, housing that people can live in that's nice and that they can eventually own and have a sense of ownership up. But all of that is the city is not in a position to do that. But everyone looks to the city to solve some of these problems. I think the council and the mayor should be putting pressure on our state and in particular our federal representatives to say, we need the money from you guys. You're the ones who have the revenue stream, the federal government, you just you can just print money, right? You're sovereign currency like they can. They absolutely do and they can. So, you know, the sorts of investments that are needed to take on housing, the opioid epidemic, alcoholism, mental health things. These are not things that the city is equipped to take on. And if the city leaders don't step up and put pressure on the people who actually can solve these things to do the right thing and to do some things that are expensive and, you know, it might sound radical, public housing is not a radical idea. But until that changes, we're just going to keep getting worse and worse. I don't see that change. The gentrification trend is not going to change. We're not ever going to get enough housing with this strategy to counteract it and for it to be affordable. And, you know, it's like the walking dead on the streets of Portland with the people who are suffering from addiction and mental illness. It's gotten worse, you know, in the 24 years I've been in town and it's really sad and it's unconscionable. But, you know, it seems like people are at least at the city level content to let the situation continue. This is exactly where, you know, Maynard kind of comes from. We start at that expectation that we should have a much better society than we do. And so things like wasted B.I.W. are news to us in a way that mainstream media editors who don't have that kind of base idea of what society should be like. They're just reporting on the messes at home. That's right. We start from a place of, you know, everyone needs to be fed house clothes, you know, help people. They're like chasing the car where you're trying to get into the car and under the hood. Yeah, we're trying to point out like here's the root problem and the fundamental problem. Yeah, right. And we try to find different ways of doing that too. I mean, we could write a lot of, you know, kind of boring dry articles about these issues full of facts and stats and so forth. But we see our role as an alternative publication to bring other ways of describing these problems, like first person voices into, you know, like Kenny Rain Beak writing about, you know, homelessness. You know, that's that's an insight into the problem that's, you know, on the ground, it's not the 10,000 foot public policy view, this or that. He's saying, here's what we need. You need a toilet here. You need to stop hassling me here. Yeah, those sorts of things. And, you know, so it's a way around the political divides to that have formed, you know, there are a lot of I think, you know, people who are conservative or right weighing even they agree with a lot of the things that I believe in, they just, you know, they see it through a different lens, maybe through religion or, you know, we all hate the government. So we have some things in common, you know, so I try as an editor, I try to find ways to find kind of alignments and to find some affinities with everyone in the community, regardless of their political position, because otherwise it gets, you've seen what happens, it just gets calcified and it's polarized and there's no movement at all. So we don't engage, we don't try to like take on that kind of political voice that's like, we're liberals, you know, versus conservatives and you know, that kind of thing. It doesn't, it doesn't really get you very far. Finishing up, do you, do you have any things you want to tell us about the next print that coming up? Yeah, coming up we're going to be introducing a new series that's about interesting people in places in Maine written by a local gentleman who happens to have a job that brings him traveling a lot through different parts of Maine. And so for this first piece we're going to be doing a profile of a very interesting record store slash huge barn in the Bangor area that this person knows about. And but they're going to go on and do different things in different parts of Maine that are just kind of strange, quirky, weird, interesting, not your typical down east magazine, lighthouses and lobster roll vision of Maine, you know, trying to get some of the more eccentric things. So that that series actually launches with our April issues. So we're excited about that. I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. It was great talking to you. Likewise. Take care, everybody. Have a good night. Thanks again. Bye bye.