Reade Brower

Reade Francis Brower is a media owner known for owning a majority of the newspapers in Maine during his tenure as owner of MaineToday Media. His network of owned papers was described by The Maine Monitor as a "near-monopoly".

Personal life
Brower grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts, to his adopted parents Carmel and Richard. He attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and graduated in 1978 with a degree in marketing. As of 2018, he is married to Martha McSweeney Brower (Martha McSweeney). They were married in 1985.

Career
Prior to owning newspapers, Brower was an entrepreneur who started several companies, including an auto catalog and direct-mail company that advertised to 600,000 Maine households each week. In 2015, Brower bought MaineToday Media from financier S. Donald Sussman. He continued purchasing Maine newspapers; in 2017, he was the owner of 24 papers in Maine, including four of the state's seven daily newspapers. In 2018, he had acquired six of the seven daily papers in the state (the exclusion being the Bangor Daily News).

On March 30, 2023, he announced he was looking to sell or take on investors to Masthead Maine, the successor to MaineToday. On March 31, Bangor Daily News reported that he owned five dailies and 25 weeklies, and six specialty publications. He was 66 at the time. On July 10, 2023, Bangor Daily News reported that Brower had sold the five daily newspapers and 17 weeklies he owned to the National Trust for Local News, a non-profit.

MaineStay Media
He also owns 6 weeklies that were not included in the 2023 sale: The Ellsworth American (Ellsworth), The Mount Desert Islander (Bar Harbor), The Courier-Gazette (Rockland), The Republican Journal (Belfast), The Camden Herald (Camden), and The Free Press (Camden). Those six papers had united under the company MaineStay Media in 2022.