Local media in the state of Maine has emerged as an unlikely and asymmetric battlefield for big American political money. Two of the country’s key left-leaning political spenders, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the medical device billionaire philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss, played a central — and previously unreported — role in the nonprofit purchase of nearly two dozen respected local newspapers in Maine, including the Portland Press Herald, the Lewiston Sun Journal and the Kennebec Journal. The July announcement by the National Trust for Local News was greeted with relief by the papers’ management, unionized employees and readers, who had feared a sale to the sort of cost-cutting investors that have scooped up troubled local news organizations.
Hansjörg Wyss was part of a serious offer for the major newspaper chain that could have prevented it from being sold to the hedge fund Alden Global Capital.
The philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss has teamed with the Maryland hotel executive Stewart Bainum in a bid to upend Alden Global Capital’s plan to acquire the newspaper chain.
