Ok, Maine's newspaper industry may well bring in almost as much revenue as the state's long-haled potato crop, according to research
touted by the Maine Press Association, but it's a "fuddy-duddy" study,"
writes Al Diamon. "Those are impressive numbers, although I suspect they'd be less so if compared to, say, the Maine fast-food industry or the state's combined convenience-store purchases or the
amount of liquor sales Maine loses to New Hampshire every year," says the "Maine Media" columnist.
To put the study in perspective, Diamon notes that Maine's newspaper industry is currently
fighting two pieces of proposed legislation - one would reduce how many legal notices the state and local governments are required to run in newspapers by allowing certain ones to be posted online,
the other " would let cities and towns use cheaper free papers for legal notices, rather than more expensive papers with second-class postage licenses."
Diamon does applaud the state's papers
for finally owning up to the fact that their fight is about retaining revenues from the legal notices. In past years, he writes, the papers had argued that their cause "was all about
transparency in government and the public's right to know."
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