PORTLAND — Marian McCue, former editor of The Forecaster, is among three journalists elected to the Maine Press Association Hall of Fame.
Also to be inducted at the MPA’s annual fall conference in October are the late Chris Cousins, who was a reporter at the Bangor Daily News, and Stephen Fay, who spent 23 years as managing editor of the Ellsworth American.
McCue purchased the former Falmouth Forecaster in 1990 at a time when it was published every two weeks and mailed to residents.
She eventually turned it, with what an MPA announcement Tuesday called “great foresight and a singular journalistic duty, into what would become arguably ‘the’ community newspaper of record for the greater Portland area.”
McCue, who lives in Portland, sold The Forecaster in 2003 to the Costello family, former publishers of the Lewiston Sun Journal. But she continued as the editor of the weekly, which launched a Southern edition in 2001, the Portland edition in 2003 and a Mid-Coast edition in 2005.
In the years since turning the newspaper’s reins over to then-managing editor Mo Mehlsak in 2006, McCue worked as a freelance reporter and wrote a monthly column for The Forecaster focused on State House issues.
“I’m thrilled and very surprised,” McCue said Tuesday about the Hall of Fame election. “It’s certainly an honor.”
She called the distinction an opportunity to laud the work of all Maine journalists, noting that the profession is “under stress with so many challenges right now.”
Cousins, who died unexpectedly last August at 42, started his career with the Advertiser Democrat in South Paris, and in 2005 was awarded a fellowship for community journalism by the Nieman Foundation.
Known for his response of “I am not afraid” to even the toughest assignments, Cousins became a general assignment reporter for The Times Record in Brunswick and then the Bangor Daily News, where he became a State House reporter in 2013.
Fay was a news reporter and then editor in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Vermont beginning in the 1970s. He joined the Ellsworth American in 1996, and mentored dozens of journalists over the years.
The MPA conference will be held at the DoubleTree by Hilton in South Portland on Oct. 19.
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