Hello!
This is Carrie and Shaun, and as you’ve probably noticed, we’ve been working hard at the Bar Harbor Story, providing local news in a way that keeps you informed, but also embraces and promotes community and the good that is within it.
We take so much time—just the two of us, with a special needs kid that has to be homeschooled—to cover our island community’s (plus, Trenton) local news in a way that’s timely, daily, and remembers that underneath the news . . . there are people who are our neighbors.
We are working hard to get the news out there—for free—for everyone. But it’s taking its toll on our family financially and honestly, sometimes, emotionally, because frontline local news in a small community? It’s hard.
Most media isn’t local (even when it claims it is). Most media has paywalls and advertisers. We don’t. That’s not a smart financial decision for us. It’s a moral one. And we’re going to try to do it for as long as we can because we’re local, we’re passionate, and we’re all about getting the news to everyone—no paywalls.
Richard Stengel, writing in The Atlantic, said, "Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism.”
As a paper that is owned and staffed by locals, we make every attempt to gather all of the facts for our readers, information that might not be part of the main story and/or information that may not be known even to our towns’ officials, but is still just as important, if not more important, to the story.
We currently have over 3,000 subscribers, the vast majority of them free, with over 230,000 article reads every month. Every one of our stories is opened at least 2,000 times. Most are opened well over that amount.
To continue to provide you with fact based, non-editorialized news, we really need your support! If you’d like to support us or subscribe? It would mean the world to us, and to the Bar Harbor Story!
There are a few ways to do that:
You can send us a one-time support via this link here. It will say “Carrie Jones Books” because that’s what our PayPal account is through.
Your business or nonprofit can sponsor the Bar Harbor Story with a banner ad. More information on that is here.
THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING OUR COMMITMENT TO ALL OF OUR COMMUNITY
If you’d like to donate to help support us, you can, but no pressure! Just click here.
If you’d like to sponsor the Bar Harbor Story, you can! Learn more here.
Hello wonderful reporters! Can you make the monthly choice variable so we can choose to give a recurring payment at more than the $5 minimum - like $10, $15, or $20/month. Monthly recurring payments are so much easier to manage, as it's just a little per month vs one big payment once a year. Thanks for considering! Kate