A monthly newspaper based in Stonington that has covered the Northeast’s commercial fishing industry for decades printed its final issue last week.
Commercial Fisheries News came to an end with its December edition in the face of declining advertising revenue, a changing media landscape and the retirement of its current senior editor, Stonington native Brian Robbins.
“It is very sad, and it’s a big change in life,” Robbins, 67, said Friday. “At least we got to do it on our own terms.”
The closure is another casualty in the shrinking news landscape and represents changes in how people find and share information today. It also marks the end of a local institution rooted in Stonington that reached around 5,000 subscribers, which for years focused on telling the stories of people in Maine’s iconic fishing and boatbuilding industries.
The newspaper that grew into CFN was co-founded in 1973 by Nat Barrows, who now publishes Penobscot Bay Press newspapers, and Robin Alden. After publishing and editing it for two decades, Alden went on to serve as commissioner of the Maine Department of Marine Resources and was the founding executive director of the Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries, also in Stonington.
The idea for the paper was born out of an argument Alden overheard between an oceanographer and a shrimp fisherman, she said at a local journalism event in October, according to the Working Waterfront newspaper.
“They both knew what they were talking about, and they could not hear each other,” she said. “I saw that what was missing was connecting everybody’s different types of knowledge and building understanding.”
Alden didn’t return a request for comment Friday.
The publication began as a monthly trade journal, “revolutionary in concept,” that was mailed to all seafood license holders in the state, according to Bangor Daily News archives.
In 1980, it broadened its scope from Maine to New England and changed to its current name from “Maine Commercial Fisheries.”
Commercial Fisheries News was later sold to Virginia-based Compass Publications. The company decided not to hire new leadership after Robbins’ retirement, he said. Its own publication, Sea Technology, also went out of print this fall.
In the early days, Commercial Fisheries News was fishermens’ source for updates on fisheries management decisions and politics, Robbins recalled. He became part of it in the 1980s, when editors responded to a letter he wrote them by asking him to freelance.
Then an offshore lobsterman with his brother, Stevie Robbins — one of Maine’s first offshore lobstermen — the younger Robbins penned features in between trips out to sea.
When he came ashore for good in 1988, he joined the staff full time, writing stories, learning photography and selling ads to boatbuilders and engine companies.
As the internet made it easier for fishermen to hear about management decisions more quickly, the paper’s role changed from a policy news source to a more people-focused publication, according to Robbins.
“When times get tougher, people like to know how other people are dealing with things,” he said.
Times also got tougher within the paper after publisher Rick Martin’s debilitating stroke in 2021, followed by his death from cancer earlier this year. The two had worked together like Martin was in the wheelhouse and Robbins was on deck, he said, but now the editor had to run both.
Robbins himself was fighting three strains of Lyme disease and a case of babesiosis, and realized this spring that it was time to step back. The closure was announced in October.
In addition to declining advertising revenue, Robbins noted an older readership and uncertainty around the future of commercial fishing as closure factors in an editorial for the paper.
“I’m proud of what CFN was, right to its very last issue,” he said Friday. “It deserved the class and dignity that we tried to put into it.”
Staff have received an outpouring of support through emails, phone calls and handwritten letters. Those letters mean the most to Robbins; though he knows the world is changing, he hopes physical media will survive.
“I wouldn’t want to live in a world where there wasn’t ink on paper, where there wasn’t magazines and newspapers and books,” he said.
Looking back, he feels “blessed and honored” to have been trusted with people’s stories – and still has more to write about the fishing community, with hopes to freelance for other outlets.
“These are my people,” he said. “This is my world.”