YEAR-END LETTER TO READERS OF THE QSJ

MOUNT DESERT, Dec. 31, 2023 - In April 2020, at the crest of the pandemic I started writing the Quietside Journal.

Every household, business, organization and government agency was in upheaval.

There was no toilet paper to be had at Hannaford’s. People hoarded sanitation wipes and hand lotions. Masks and hospital beds were in short supply. The Maine CDC director Nirav Shah became an instant folk hero for his daily report on the state of the emergency.

In this caldron, I began to write - from an instinctive impulse to cover “breaking news” - as if I was back 50 years ago at the Hartford Courant trying to extract as much detail about a triple fatal as I could from the duty officer of the Westbrook barracks of the Connecticut state police.

I loved the urgency, the adrenaline flow and the task at hand. For several months, I dutifully reported the local news and posted articles on social media to build a following.

Then in July that year, a landscape contractor complained to me that his application for $10,000 in Paycheck Protection money was rejected because he had no full-time employees, only “1099” hourly workers, while several island employers got seven-figure checks.

Among those were the MDI Hospital, College of the Atlantic and the island’s two biggest hoteliers.

That summer I reported, “The owner of the Bar Harbor Holiday Inn received $1 million to retain 12 workers, which seemed like a typo. I tried numerous time to contact Eben Salvatore, who runs the hotel among other hotels owned by Ocean Properties, but to no avail.

“A clause in the PPP added by Maine Senator Susan Collins allowed any hotel chain that has more than one physical location but employs fewer than 500 per location to qualify for loans. The other big hotel operator on MDI, Witham, received a more modest $350,000 to $1 million loan, although it did not state in the papers filed how many jobs would be retained.”

I also reported that Islesford Dock Restaurant in Little Cranberry Island took in up to $350,000 in federal money even though one of its owners, the billionaire Mitchell Rales, is one of the wealthiest summer residents on MDI.

The article was shared widely on social media and became the most read since I started writing.

It prompted me to expand the scope of the QSJ.

Was it just a local news blog, a newsletter, a public service announcement, a website with an occasional online rant?

At the time I really didn’t know. Recently retired as a senior executive of a major media company, I found quiet comfort in the easy pace in Maine, where I had spent almost 40 summers.

I soon declared it a local news blog, without fully understanding such an appellation came with of plenty of baggage. Trust in such online publications varied widely. It was not nytimes.com nor boston.com, two brands which I had the opportunity oversee and which did not need explanation.

In launching the QSJ, I started with a blank canvas and zero audience. After my article on PPP, I knew what I wanted to be, and what I didn’t want to be - a stenographer dutifully recording public comments. That was not journalism and fails to tell the bigger story. Often it gives a misleading picture.

I wanted to write more about the struggles of contractors and other enterprises trying to arrest the takeover of the island by the unrelenting force of a single industry.

I decided the Quietside Journal would be a derivative product of three historic epochs and their influences:

• Pamphleteering - reporting and researching a cause with a strident and purposeful voice to stir the citizenry. It was best represented by Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” published in 1776 and which played a major role in the founding of the Republic.

• Muckraking - Exposing society’s excesses was the job of reform-minded journalists at the Fin de siècle of the 19th century and into the early 20th century such as Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens. Tarbell condemned John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless business practices which led to the dismantling of Standard Oil in 1911. Much of their work appeared in magazines such as McClure’s. Later such work would be called investigative reporting or watchdog journalism.

• Digital media - The internet may have disrupted many media models, but it also gave birth to new ones, such as the QSJ. Town meetings are now Zoomed. A plethora of searchable data bases is available at the touch of a few keys. And now comes artificial intelligence. As the printing press spawned a new era of distribution of the published word, digital media created many new voices.

In 2021 I wrote this as the QSJ’s new mission statement:

“A news blog on Mount Desert Island written in the tradition of pamphleteers to stir the citizenry toward a common good.”

The takeover of the island by a single industry is a running theme in the QSJ - from the battle over a massive campground which fractured the residents of Tremont, to how in five years AirBNB turned entire neighborhoods into transient lodging, to how an industry with the foulest environmental reputation has come to identify Mount Desert Island and not its verdant beauty.

There’s no shortage of those who would plunder the natural gifts of Maine’s magnificent coastline. The QSJ wrote more articles than any other journalist on the proposed salmon farm in Frenchman Bay by a convicted felon who was aided and abetted in his effort by our own state government.

As early as November 2021 I published, “Is Maine up to regulating the aquaculture industry, and protecting the state's coastline?”

In January 2023, I wrote the article, “State peddling coastal towns to fish farms without local officials' knowledge.”

Sometimes my reporting resulted in a course correction.

I was persuaded by the assertion that entanglement and ship strikes are the two major causes of the decline of the population of North Atlantic right whales.

Until I interviewed Richard Pace, the chief scientist behind the foundational study, “Cryptic Mortality of North Atlantic right whales,” the centerpiece of the environmentalists’ lawsuit which earlier this year was thrown out by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C.

I called Pace on March 1, 2021 on a phone line on the NOAA website which listed his direct number. I was shocked when he answered.

You may listen to the entire interview here. Starting at Minute 29:20, Pace stated clearly that the majority of Maine lobstermen do not fish where right whales migrate. Some have estimated the catch in state waters closer to shore to be about 90 percent of the entire annual take in Maine.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OIo89t-5lr33-qsJwwi2muM4kztjji5u/view?usp=sharing

“I've always thought it was incredible that the guys who fish only in state waters, all these guys that are on small boats, that are within a three-mile buffer of state waters, didn't throw the offshore guys under the bus,” Pace told me.

Today, a typical post of mine will get 5,000 to 6,000 views. On March 4, 2023 I set a personal best with an article about a scathing rebuke of Bar Harbor by a federal judge which was read 9,877 times.

In June 2023, I began to accept donations but kept the site free for most readers. The additional revenue helped pay for my expenses, such as libel insurance and representation by the best First Amendment lawyers in the country. In August I had to use that law firm to oppose an attempt by the chair of the Mount Desert Planning Board to interfere with my reporting of public meetings.

He was the only vote in support of the wealthy summer residents who opposed affordable housing in Northeast Harbor, I reported.

In 2024, we will hear from US District Court Judge Lance Walker again as he rules on the lawsuit against the Town of Bar Harbor for capping visiting cruise ship passengers at 1,000 a day. The lawsuit was brought by land-based businesses at the point of the spear on West Street where passengers disembark and proceed to swarm Downtown Bar Harbor.

A ruling against the town, however, will bear consequences far beyond the narrow issue of a passenger cap.

It will complete the remake of the town and potentially the entire island as one which serves the interest of a single industry - a makeover which started a half century ago but will reach a crescendo after the remaining speed bumps are removed.

Two other lawsuits are moving through Maine’s highest court, but their impact will be moot if Walker rules against the town. One suit is an appeal of a judgement that the town’s charter revision was illegal and the other is an appeal by a real estate broker to overturn the town’s cap on AirBNB and VRBO rentals.

So 2024 will define Mount Desert Island and potentially bring to closure my own quixotic mission here.