A columnist who’s among several ousted by Maine’s largest daily paper fears that the next shoe to drop may be the staff writers.

“I share the worry of many that layoffs of staff writers could be next,” said Avery Yale Kamila, the first ousted freelance columnist to break her silence.

Make no mistake, Kamila says – the part-time writers who recently got the boot by the National Trust for Local News did not quit – they were fired.

“It was not my choice to end my column,” she said. “Rather, it was the paper’s decision, which I was told was done as a cost-saving measure.”

The trust axed the freelance culture columnists in the wake of widespread spending cutbacks that came after the trust’s CEO took a huge pay hike, raising the hackles of those who were summarily jettisoned.

The trust bought the Portland Press Herald and a bunch of weeklies in 2023, insisting its No. 1 mission would be local news.

But as Steve Robinson, editor-in-chief of this platform, commented, “Good grief. The irony is too rich for me. The ‘Trust for Local News’ is getting rid of all things local.”

Since buying most of Maine’s newspapers, the trust has eliminated the daily Brunswick Times Record, turning it into a twice-weekly, and killed two weeklies – the Southern Forecaster and Coastal Journal – in broad cost-cutting moves.

After trimming the weeklies, the so-called non-profit trust took aim at its freelance writers at the state’s biggest paper.

The latest freelancer to lose his writing gig was sports scribbler Tom Caron, who strangely used his farewell column to heap praise on the executives who had just told him he was all done.

“Many columnists have been let go, but I have yet to see a full list of the cuts,” Kamila said. “There is a lot of reader confusion and upset about these changes. My understanding is that none of the columnists retired, they were all laid off.

“I’ve received numerous emails, texts and messages from people wanting to cancel their subscriptions in protest,” she added. “I’ve been advising all to keep subscribing, because we need local news more than ever, even if it is less than it used to be.”

Editor’s note: Ted Cohen is a former longtime Portland Press Herald staffer.