The Biddeford Gazette was launched by Randy Seaver of Biddeford in November 2024 as a simple idea — a concept and a different approach to providing regular, local news coverage in his hometown.
A well-known and veteran reporter in the Biddeford community, Randy was engaged in some freelance work and once again reporting about Biddeford, but he was growing increasingly frustrated about what he saw as gaps in local media coverage.
Over time, Seaver decided that the city deserved more aggressive and frequent news coverage. He and his wife Laura — a former Biddeford city councilor — formally launched the Gazette’s website two months later in January 2025.
The Seavers kept things low-key, and they focused on building a digital media platform with straight-forward reporting and sharply worded opinion pieces.
The Seavers made only a minimal investment in their business. They registered a new web domain and bought some business cards.
The first story published on the Biddeford Gazette’s website was posted on Jan. 14, 2025. It was a story about an upcoming school bond question
“We told each other, we’ll see how it goes,” Laura Seaver recalled. “If we’re not having fun after six months, we can just stop.”
The Seavers had no idea what was about to happen, or about how quickly the community was going to embrace the small, somewhat scrappy, digital news platform.
Starting with a bang
The Seavers created social media pages and put their noses to the proverbial grindstone, but they could have never predicted the community’s reaction.
People embraced the Gazette and almost immediately began referring to it as “Biddeford’s paper of record.”
Several people – including some former journalists – stepped up to help. Volunteers and unsolicited offers of financial support appeared without asking
Just a few weeks after the Gazette’s launch, the weekly Biddeford-Saco-OOB Courier ceased its printed publication, ending a 36-year run of providing local news coverage. The award-winning daily Journal Tribune had closed a few years before, and Biddeford –despite being York County’s largest community — was being virtually ignored by the Portland Press Herald.
It was the right time and the right place for the birth of a scrappy, hyper-local news outlet.
The First Year
The Gazette led the way in providing in-depth coverage of the city’s biennial elections. Randy organized the only debate between the three mayoral candidates.
The Gazette dug deep and hard with enterprise reporting including a three-part series regarding the city’s housing crisis. They broke big stories but also never overlooked the little stories that make up the community’s heart and soul.
The Gazette also did something that no other media outlet in southern Maine was doing: They used their resources to share news stories and features about Biddeford — from other media outlets, something that is virtually unheard of in the hyper-competitive news industry.
The Gazette forged a collaborative relationship with The Maine Monitor and saw its reporting shared on local television news stations.
The Seavers recruited a, nine-member Advisory Board of community leaders to help guide their ongoing news coverage.
And then – almost exactly one year after our official launch — the Biddeford Gazette became officially registered and incorporated as a non-profit media company.
New partnerships and collaborative opportunities are on the horizon. “The Gazette’s best days are ahead of us,” Randy Seaver said.
Note: To see our list of 2025’s Top 10 Biddeford news stories, please click this link: Top 10 Biddeford News Stories | 2025
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