Portland Press Herald

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The April 4, 2007 front page of the Portland Press Herald
Type	Daily newspaper
Format	Broadsheet

Owner	Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc.
Publisher	Charles Cochrane
Editor	Jeannine Guttman
Founded	1862
Price	USD 0.60 - news stands USD 0.75 - vending machines
Headquarters	390 Congress Street Portland, Maine 04101-5009 United States

Website: MaineToday.com

The Portland Press Herald / Maine Sunday Telegram, collectively known as The Portland Newspapers, publish daily and Sunday newspapers in Portland, Maine

The Portland Press Herald is a daily newspaper published every day except Sunday. It serves Portland, the state's largest and most commercially important city, as well as the majority of Southern Maine.

The paper's Sunday edition, the Maine Sunday Telegram, is published every Sunday.

The newspaper, founded in 1862 on Congress Street, is the largest in the state in terms of both circulation and reporting staff. To this day, its offices remain in the Gannett Building on the corner of Congress and Exchange Streets, near the Old Port section of the city. The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram is owned by Blethen Maine Newspapers, Inc. which is part of The Seattle Times family of newspapers and is owned by the Blethen family. Blethen Maine Newspapers also owns Central Maine Newspapers, which publishes the Waterville Morning Sentinel and the Kennebec Journal and Maine Community Publications, which publishes The Maine Switch and The Coastal Journal. Daily, the Portland Press Herald delivers to a five-county area: Cumberland, York, Sagadahoc, Knox and Lincoln. On Sundays, the Maine Sunday Telegram is circulated statewide.

The Portland Press Herald has news bureaus in Augusta, Biddeford, Brunswick, and Sanford. The paper also operates 7 Regional Circulation Depots in Portland, South Portland, Windham, Yarmouth, Bath, Saco, and Sanford, The Press Herald's website is produced by MaineToday.com [1].

MaineToday.com is Maine's most comprehensive news and information resource. In addition to news content from the Portland Press Herald [2], Kennebec Journal [3] and Morning Sentinel [4], the site delivers a wide variety of online-only news, information and advertising, all focused on Maine. MaineToday.com attracts 500,000 unique visitors monthly and delivers 7 million pageviews, comparable to much larger U.S. markets.

In September 2006, MaineToday.com launched myMaineToday.com [5], a unique initiative referred to as "citizen media" that combines the immediacy of the web and the power of grassroots knowledge. Residents of Maine towns such as Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth, North Yarmouth and Freeport can post news items, photos and upcoming events directly into their town's page on myMaineToday.com.

[edit] Anti-Semitism Controversy

In the Religion and Values section of the Saturday, February 3, 2007 edition of the Press Herald included an ad by the First Baptist Church of South Portland in which the sermon was The Only Way to Destroy the Jewish Race. This caused outrage in Greater Portland's Jewish Community^[1] and led to an apology by the Minister of that particular church.

However, less than two weeks later, People's Choice Credit Union ran an ad in the February 14, 2007 edition of the Press Herald that depicted a bearded "Fee Bandit," which resembled a Hasidic Jew, eager to take people's money.^[2] This incident had the Anti-Defamation League, Steven Wessler, director of the Center for the Prevention of Hate Violence and the person in charge of dealing with Hate Crimes in the State, and the Jewish Community Alliance all investigating the issue. The newspaper later apologized for printing the advertisements in question without checking them first, and said that they would scrutinize ad content more closely before printing them.^[3]