MEDIA WATCH

Morning Sun rises on Portland

By Noah Bruce

The first 5000 copies of The Portland Morning Sun, the latest addition to the city’s news scene, hit the stands Monday, October 8.

Fortunately for editor and publisher Ed Pickett, the Sunýs first edition coincided with the beginning of the US/British bombing campaign of Afghanistan which began a day earlier. “We couldn’t have picked a better news day,” says Pickett, who was just trying to get the paper out before the Newspaper Guild at the Portland Press Herald went on strike and put out their own competing daily. “If they had started their own paper,” says Pickett, “it would have so confused things we would never have been able to start.”

Both Monday’s and Tuesday’s Sun ran 20 pages long and consisted of two sections. In addition to local, state, national, and sports coverage, the paper features a cartoon page (two of them, actually), and the New York Times crossword puzzle. The paper augments stories written by its two reporters with pieces from the AP news service, Maine writer and former MPR news director Mal Leary, and the New York Times news service — which includes their op-ed page, some of the best political commentary around.

Pickett says the Sun, which is distributed in Portland, South Portland, Gorham, Scarborough, Westbrook, and Falmouth was originally going to be printed in tabloid format (like the Phoenix), but “we changed our minds” and went with a broadsheet format (like the Press Herald). Pickett says that combined with the fact that the Sun is a free paper, the tabloid format would have lacked the air of seriousness that he wanted.

Pickett says Monday’s paper was “not what I wanted it to be,” referring to some typos and editing errors throughout the first edition. He explains that the Sun’s computer crashed three hours before the paper’s deadline, and “we didn’t have time to proof and do the things we wanted to do. Still it doesn’t look awful.” Computer problems may or may not explain Tuesday’s paper, which contained a front-page headline noting Floridians had come down with “Anthrix” and a mascot story that started on the front page, but continued nowhere (lamentably, as we wanted to know if a relationship was going to develop between “Mercy Bear” and “Oakie the Oakhurst Acorn”).

Regardless of typos and the like (hey, we’re not throwing stones, really), the paper is likely to gain a following if only for the Times puzzle and the Times op-ed page, which even held the interest of cynical folks here at our own free rag.