A week after a round of layoffs - the Portland Press Herald announced today that they are up for sale. Portland is a great city to live in and the PPH has always been well designed and a good read - so aside from the general economic downturn in the industry - this probably has as much to do with the Blethen family's ownership of the Seattle Times as it does with the Portland/Maine market. The paper has been going through the usual online growing pains - with control over online 'news' recently switching from the MaineToday.com portal site back to the individual newsrooms at the PPH, the KJ and the Morning Sentinel. This has got to be disruptive in the newsrooms - though the owners indicate they would like to sell it to 'community investors' which could be good for the papers if it happened. The fact that the price will probably be in the $100 million range - not the $200 million Blethen paid in 1998 could also help. That newspaper group covers about half the population in the state so this sale is of no little importance to residents.

Tags: Portland, newspapers, sale

So, in an effort to update the blogs more often, I am testing out the Flock browser. Pretty happy so far - it allows an easy XMLRPC connection to multiple blogs, as well as instant access to other social web services such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and others. I am probably the last to this party - but looking forward to testing it out

Tags: Flock, blogs, twitter, social