I’m not sure what I expected, exactly.

At first, working for a brewery seemed like the coolest idea on the planet. I am, after all, a lover of the libation. The beers are quality (this particular brewery was recently ranked the number one brewery in the northeast); the owners of the company are nice. The coworkers seemed quirky, interesting, and well informed. Perfect!

Every day I would pour the same little tasters of great beer. I would tell the same stories that I’d been told to tell about how the beer was inspired, researched, created. I would talk about how the ginger flavored beer was brewed to go well with Thai food, even though I knew this to be an absolute fabrication. I would tell people how we used real coffee in our coffee stout. I had, after all, also been told to say this. Then, a member of middle management who we’d come to half jokingly call “the Gestapo” behind his back shared this with the brewer who would tell our boss and reprimand us for sharing the same information that we’d been told to share.

Good grief!

So it was with profound relief when I stumbled on an ad for a reporting position at one of the local community newspapers. I’ve been a writer for years, I’ve freelanced here and there, written essays for a bunch of publications, even penned a novel that I’ve yet to sell. You see, it’s hard to write, it’s harder to write well, but it’s nearly impossible to make any sort of living at it.

So I was excited. I jumped into work with more gusto then I’ve shown for anything in a very long time. I wrote articles, started learning all of the AP Style tips. I joked about how it was such a perfect job that it was bound to come crashing down around me within a week or two.

It actually took three.

On a slow Friday I was assigned a story that was supposed to be minor piece of scuttlebutt. As I investigated, I learned that it was actually a major story involving a high profile non-profit that had possibly been committing fraud, bouncing payroll checks, and a host of other potentially serious misadventures. Their entire staff had just quit en masse in a statement of unified protest. I interviewed all the major players, current and former board members, and several employees. I did exactly what reporters are supposed to do. I offered to show my editor my evidence and she refused to see it. I attempted to call her several times to clue her into how this was developing and she refused to take my calls.

After finally reading the article she assured me that it was a good story and that they were going to run it. She mentioned that it might have to be a two part series. I was fine with that. So it came as a surprise when my article was posted online several hours later—only it wasn’t actually my article.

My editor had chosen to cut most of my article. She’d chosen to re-write it, add her name to the byline, and change the basic meaning of the story from. Of course, she had the right to do this. As I was reminded by the president of the company, anything I wrote for them was considered their intellectual property. However does that make it right? Does it make it ethically justifiable? Does it make it a legitimate way to run a community news organization?

Why would she do this?

She claimed that I didn’t have enough evidence and that she was afraid my sources would get sued. She claimed that I didn’t understand because I’d only been a journalist for a few weeks. She claimed that I needed to learn a lesson, that there were “certain people in this town that I couldn’t push”. But what was she really scared of? Perhaps a lawsuit? Perhaps a decline in advertising revenue? Perhaps an angry member of the community?

When I first found this island I was awed by its magical qualities, it’s expansive beauty, the ease at which its moneyed classes mixed with those in service positions, its nightlife, and its eccentric year round inhabitants.

Yet as an adult I see the island more and more for what people have been assuring me it really is: just another excuse to rip off unwitting tourists and force people into what is essentially indentured servitude. The same jobs that paid two or three dollars better per hour than comparable ones in other places have now all but disappeared. For example, barista work in this town has generally paid workers around $13 an hour. Now it’s down to $9 per hour. The kicker: everyone around here will admit that the recession really hasn’t hit Bar Harbor in the same way that its hit other places. But now even rich people are scared. Business owners are getting scared. Consumers are scared.

Newspapers even, it seems, are scared.

Timothy Rich is a freelance writer and former man about town. He is now a hermetic, insular, Stephen King loving, machete wielding islander who makes fun of handicapped dogs. He really brings nothing to the table.