Carrie Jones and Shaun Farrar

Sep 07, 2026

We don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s Labor Day, and we’ve been working and putting out information and articles for you all pretty much like every day of the year.

There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t that we’re workaholics. It’s because we feel a responsibility to you—our readers—and our community. That responsibility doesn’t stop.

That responsibility is why we haven’t paused much at all in the four years since Carrie started this little experiment called the Bar Harbor Story.

What began as a service to showcase the amazing people and events of our community has turned into a trusted news source in the Acadia region and a full-time job for the two of us.

Even as it takes up more of our time, The Bar Harbor Story continues because we care. And we’ll continue to care about this community year after year.

That’s why we do this. That’s why we’re free.

Because we have stayed true to our founding tenets of providing accurate and free news that embraces and promotes community and the good that is within it, we have experienced phenomenal growth.

We didn’t expect that.

In the last two years, we have doubled our subscribers from over 3,000 to over 6,000. When we first started, we probably had 24 readers. We’ve never advertised. It’s all been word of mouth.

In the past two years, our monthly article reads have grown from over 230,000 per month to over 400,000 and the majority of our stories are read over 4,000 times, again, a 100% increase.

All those numbers are really simple math; if the subscriber base doubles, then one would expect the corresponding numbers to double. True.

To us, though, it’s more than that. It means we’re doing exactly what we want to do for our neighbors: we’re helping.

The job we do is about news, yes, but it’s also about helping the people of our community and we do it with the community and we do it for the community.

And yes, for those who ask, Carrie does get tired sometimes. I do too. That doesn’t matter.

Part of what matters is that our subscriptions are free. We have no paywalls, and we truly hope that a good portion of our readers are more engaged with their local communities now because they can read quality news for free.

It’s more than that though.

It’s also about telling the good stories of the community in a way that’s unafraid of embracing that good—embracing the stories that unite us, not just divide us, the stories that connect us, stories in which we discover things about our community or each other that we might not expect.

That might be about Jayson Clough’s efforts for making life better for kids in Tremont, about Jeremy Dougherty’s bike bus in Bar Harbor, about Taylor Ehrlich trying to create a pollinator pathway, or about two brothers in Frenchboro—boys just entering eighth grade—saving their captain.

But our other goal is to help our community act and make change, to understand how their government works, to learn more when they want to (by providing links to learn more), and to have the tools to navigate through their lives and local government.

That might be about Tremont’s deer hunt, Bar Harbor’s Sustainable Tourism Task Force, Trenton’s Volunteer Fire Department’s quest for additional water supplies, Southwest Harbor’s soil ordinance or new chamber office opening, Mount Desert’s potential changes to how it takes care of its trash.

Free, unbiased, and accurate news will always be a major cornerstone of the Bar Harbor Story’s foundation with the belief that people who can’t afford a subscription or who get frustrated by trying to read something they have an interest in, but can’t because of a paywall, can now be better informed and more connected to their community.

It’s not a great business model, we know. Believe us.

That’s because community isn’t really always about great business models. It’s about caring.

As a paper that is truly owned and staffed by locals, we make every attempt to gather all of the facts for our readers, information that might not be part of the main story and/or information that may not be known even to our towns’ officials, but is still just as important, if not more important, to the story.

To continue to provide you with fact based, non-editorialized news, we do really need your support if you can give it! If you’d like to support us or become a paid subscriber? It would mean the world to us, and to the Bar Harbor Story!

There are a few ways to do that:

• You can send us a one-time support via this link
• You can become a paid subscriber here or here.
• Your business or nonprofit can sponsor the Bar Harbor Story with a banner ad. More information on that is here.

THANK YOU FOR SUPPORTING OUR COMMITMENT TO YOUR COMMUNITY

Follow us on Facebook or BlueSky or Instagram. And as a reminder, you can easily view all our past stories and press releases here.