What We’re About and What We’re Not. The Bar Harbor Story: Not a Blog. Not a Newsletter. A Local Paper With a Mission.

And a shout out to our sponsors, founding members, and paid subscribers who make it possible for us to keep bringing news for our community

and

Jun 21, 2025

Photo by our kiddo, Emily Ciciotte. Acadia National Park.

ACADIA REGION—We’ve been thinking a lot about how we’re different from other news agencies and how we should share that with you all. I hope you’ll be patient with us as we do this. It’s rare that we directly address you and that’s on purpose. It’s because though we are very much a part of the Mount Desert Island community, we don’t like to insert ourselves in our news.

Our news is meant for you. It’s not supposed to be about us (Carrie and Shaun) though we write it.

But we wanted to answer some questions about what the Bar Harbor Story is, especially for those of you who have only recently joined us and there’s been a lot of you.

So, here’s what we do and here’s how we think we’re different.

WHAT WE ARE:

We’re not a blog. We’re not a newsletter. We’re a digital newspaper. There’s a difference.

A blog is personal. A newspaper? It isn’t.

A blog is usually opinion. A newspaper is meant to deal in facts and information.

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 1.5 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 and attending meetings for 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. Our role is also not to ignore.

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 openly.

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 sent to us by an organization or business, 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 this amazing island we’re lucky enough to call home.

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 outside of our own site; and we like semicolons.

Just kidding about that semicolon.

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 local news agencies and journalists who do get them. And we’ll be super proud of them.

We have some cool things coming up soon.

We have some ideas about how to build community and share each other’s stories. They might work. They might not work. We’re going to try.

Briefs and election coverage and people we’ve lost and letters.

We have a dedicated briefs section here if you don’t want to wait for our big briefs article to come out at the end of the week.

Similarly, we have a dedicated election coverage section here. You can see past stories and see candidates’ profiles. We’ll take the section down (though the stories will stay) until next year.

People we’ve lost? That’s here.

And letters from readers? That’s here.

OUR SPONSORS, FOUNDING MEMBERS, AND PAID SUBSCRIBERS

Without business and community member’s support, we could not fulfill our mission of providing access to community based news for free to all who wish to receive it. We simply could not!

Our coverage area is what we have come to call the Acadia Region: Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, Tremont, and Trenton and it literally takes all the time that we have (and we are happy to give it) for the two of us to cover the events that happen in this area.

Our sponsors realize that while they’re getting their business or nonprofit out there, they’re also showing the community that they are here for them, too—here to make sure the community has access to daily local news (that’s free)—timely news that’s not just about the community and it’s accurate news that’s for the community, written by just two people who love the community, too.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank each and every one of you who have financially supported us over the last three years! Your support means everything to us and it helps us keep going.

FOUNDING MEMBERS

Founding members are individuals, families, or businesses that have donated $150 or more to the Bar Harbor Story. Their faith in us is a really big deal and we want to thank them again for their support.

The Bar Harbor Story would also like to thank the many other founding members who chose to remain anonymous.

PAID SUBSCRIBERS

Just as important are our paid subscribers who support us by paying for a subscription for community news and features and information that they do not have to pay for. Their support (just like the founding members’ and sponsors’ support) helps us not go bankrupt.

We take a lot of time every week, every day, to make sure everyone can have free access to the news for their community and that takes a financial toll on us. Paid subscribers are the foundation of the Bar Harbor Story’s existence! Thank you all so much!

Update: Due to a glitch, four founding members were left off this article when it first went out. We’ve updated that at 5:32 and we’ll be including them in our next article to make sure everyone knows!

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