BANGOR, Maine — Erin Rhoda, a veteran Maine reporter, has joined the Bangor Daily News as its new editorial page editor.
Rhoda will be responsible for shaping the BDN’s editorial and opinion pages. She will work with the newspaper’s editorial board, overseen by Publisher Rick Warren.
Rhoda spent more than two years as a reporter for the Morning Sentinel, based in Waterville, and also has worked at The Courier-Gazette in Rockland. Rhoda is a graduate of Colby College in Waterville and a Mitchell scholar.
“It’s an honor to work for the Bangor Daily News and write its opinions on important Maine issues,” Rhoda said. “My grandparents were farmers in Milo and read the Bangor Daily for years and years.”
“As a native Mainer, Erin knows the issues that are important to our readers. Her perspective on the state and its direction will help lead the pages and offer Maine a fresh voice politically,” said Todd Benoit, director of news and new media. “I think readers will be impressed by her work.”
Previous editorial page editor Tom Groening made the transition Monday into his new role as midcoast bureau chief. He will lead a team of reporters along the coast covering issues from Belfast to Brunswick.
Rhoda can be reached by email at erhoda@bangordailynews.com or by phone at 207-990-8204.
If Tomorrow’s editorial is going to be the new norm, I won’t be reading the editorial section anymore. I wish the BDN would’ve hired someone who knows how to write and think for themselves rather than just copy/paste democrat press releases.
HA! My best friend would have thought the same, except he would have replaced “Democrat” with “Repubican”
Strange – I find the BDN further to the right than I care for.
Really?
Doesn’t really matter to me who they have. I don’t read the BDN Editorials. Way to one sided, if i wanted to be told how i should think or vote i would start watching CNN .
Does it even matter anymore?
It’s Bush’s fault.
And so on.
Colby ’06? Are you kidding me? I’m sure she can relate to her fellow Mainers judging from this bit in ColbyMagazine.com
Rural Somerset County, her beat, looks like a place to settle down. “There are a lot of fascinating people here,” she said. “There are a lot of strange people.”
Well now, let me see, yes I see it Bangor Daily News supports more women’s issues, what’s next for us men, live in slave shacks.
I hope she bucks the BDN’s trend toward “Citizen Journalists.” If the BDN wants to become “just another blog site”, that’s fine. But I know I would like the BDN to return to being a real newspaper, with real writers, and not depend on local bloggers and AP/UPI newswires for stories and stop using Facebook for information about people in news stories.
3 editors in less than a year. What’s with that BDN? Trouble at the helm?
Do you really need to ask that question? Of course there is trouble in river city. Have you seen the actual paper of late? I havent actually purchased one in years.
Most farmers in Milo (and elsewhere) cancelled their BDN subscriptions years ago because of crappy editorials and opinions that were so “out of touch”.
Ms. Rhoda – Congratulations and good luck in your new position.
The BDN’s editorial page has suffered badly for many years due to a severe leftward lurch. To my knowledge, this page has yet to apologize for smearing the Tea Party and Conservatives for implicating both in the atrocious shooting of Rep. Gabby Giffords and others. That might be a good place to start.
Please consider printing this and posting it above your computer screen: “Democrats are not necessarily good; Republicans are not necessarily bad.” This might help you take the “jerk” out of the BDN’s notoriously leftist knee-jerk responses to all things political.
I would have written the same thing, except I would have said it was a rightward lurch.
Just goes to show the challenges they (BDN) are up against.
At least I’m smart enough to realize I -am- Liberal, and don’t think I’m on “middle ground.” Something more people should learn…where they really stand, and stop thinking of themselves as “unbiased.”
Silly person. There is nothing “rightward” about the BDN’s daily attacks on Gov. LePage and the Republican majority.
Liberalism is a failed political philosophy. The lie is proven when one considers that liberals want to open our borders to people who come to this country illegally, when our safety net is already pulling apart at its seams from low-income AMERICANS. If you cared about poor Americans, you would support appropriate border enforcement. It is clear that you folks just want more people enslaved to your never-ending entitlements, forcing this country’s acheivers to pay to support this country’s deceivers, who will vote for you to keep their welfare payments from drying up.
Want higher taxes? Go ahead and pay them – no one is stopping you. Just don’t force me to do the same, esp. to fund the 300,000 + abortions these tax dollars pay for through Murder, Inc. AKA Planned Parenthood.
I’d be happy to pay more taxes and fund Planned Parenthood myself, no beef with that at all.
Just give me back the trillions that you took from us to pay for the bank bailouts and the bonus money that taxpayers gave to executives, and I’ll send my money where I want, and you go ahead and give yours to the bankers.
You do understand that many conservatives 0pposed the bank bailout long before the come-late to the party left.
I do. What shocks me is that is was only “many.”
Goldman Sachs and Wall Street backed Obama and the Dems (with cold hard cash) more than they backed Republicans.
See: John Corzine.
Of course they did! Bush had done his two terms, he was on his way out. He put the bail-out package together, but it was Obama they needed for the next 4-8 years!
Not anymore… not that facts matter much when talking to repugs, or faux “conservative” reactionaries. Get an idea stuck in your heads and it’s harder to dislodge than a fox news commentator’s noggin from the backside of the gop’s central committee. Hmmm, may be that’s where those ideas come from in the first place…
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/04/why-does-wall-street-dislike-obama-so-much.html
Hi sdemetri’
John Corzine is one of Obama’s top bundlers having raised to date over $500k from his Wall street banker buddies in the first quarter of 2012.
http://www.barackobama.com/2012-first-quarter-volunteer-fundraisers
The bottom of the page under $500k– plus.
nice to see you.
Likewise, but check out the Delong article. Seems there has been a shift. But even so, these guys give money to both parties all the time… they know how the system works, and they know the dems are not a whole lot different when it comes to policy that benefits their industry from the repubs… a red herring… really. Publicly financed elections would be a huge step forward in removing the corruption of money out of our politics. Don’t you agree? Then this argument would be moot.
I challenge you to sit down with me and go over every page of the last month of the BDN. We will break down every piece as to bias, and to which side. This challenge will determine whether you have any personal integrity or all, or whether your ideological beliefs have corrupted any honesty you may have had.
You can challenge me all you want. My personal integrity is no more dependent on your say-so, than your personal integrity is dependent on my say-so.
Nice try, though.
I just read this piece in The Maine Wire regarding Stephen Betts assignement to cover the Midcoast, after years of writing highly leftist editorials for the Village Soup. I urge all those who are concerned about the leftward lurch of this once excellent hometown newspaper, and the sloppy partisanship that results. The collapse that Village Soup saw could happen to this paper as well if it fails to straighten up and fly center.
http://www.themainewire.com/2012/04/bangor-dailys-farcical-kruger-coverage/
Final paragraph:
“Betts commits a slew of journalistic crimes in his piece, but two are particularly blatant. First, he wrote a story about us, The Maine Wire/ MHPC, and Kruger. He spoke with Kruger, but didn’t bother contacting us. Second, he wrote a story basically blaming us for Kruger’s alleged threats, which no one but Kruger actually knows really happened. But he ignores the documented threats MHPC received as a result of our reporting on Kruger’s outrageous comments. Although we published the actual threat phone calls earlier this week, Betts doesn’t mention that Kruger’s crazy sympathizers are threatening to “hunt us down” and “take us out”.”
Congratulations Erin. Just one thought. The majority of Mainers are not Democrats or Republican enrolled voters. They are non-enrolled, independent. The single greatest leap in editorial page credibility came when the generally pro-Republican BDN endorsed independent gubernatorial candidate James B. Longley, propelling him to the governorship.
Jim Longley was a Democrat who ran as an Independent because he missed the filing deadline(albeit a fiscally conservative Dem).
Not to pat anyone’s back, but I’ve read the BDN since the early ’60s, and IMHO it’s always been the best paper in the State regardless of any perceived political leanings.
I’m sure Erin will do a great job, she’s smart and fair-minded and she grew up in rural Maine. She has a good work ethic and deep love of her home state. Good choice BDN!
“As a native Mainer, Erin knows the issues that are important to the democratic party” – Fixed that for you!
Will she be involved in the online content? PLEASE institute a policy of only pulling posts once they have been reviewed, not as a knee jerk reaction to someone flagging it. Seriously, pulled posts make NO sense, no matter how offensive.