MEDIA

West End news

By Noah Bruce

Watch out Munjoy Hill Observer and Inside Bayside, there’s a new neighborhood rag in town: the West End Times.

“The basic idea is to have a community paper so that issues important to the West End of town receive some coverage,” says Ed King, editor of the paper.

The Times will probably be published monthly, and the first edition will come out either the first or second week of February.

The paper is funded by Portland West, but will not be an “advertising sheet” for the neighborhood organization. King, who will receive a small stipend for his role as editor, columnist, ad salesman, and cartoonist says he has been given “as much leeway as I wanted” in running the publication.

King has been involved in the newspaper business for 30 years, mostly with neighborhood papers. He makes a living as a freelance writer and cartoonist and is the creator of The Portland Funny Map, a cartoon map of the city.

According to Ethan Strimling, executive director of Portland West, the paper will have a distribution around 300. Strimling says the West End has been without a neighborhood paper since Portland West stopped publishing Good Neighbors in 1998.

“We wanted to focus on community building. We wanted to create a paper that was by and for the community,” says Strimling.

Despite a first issue of just eight pages, the publication already has one advantage over every other paper in town: a Washington correspondent. “A woman I worked with at Maine Biz who lives in DC has agreed to regularly submit articles,” says King.