What they saw, they said, might help transform the community by raising students and families from generations of hardship.
Steve Collins
Columnist
Steve Collins became an opinion columnist for the Maine Trust for Local News in April of 2025. A journalist since 1987, Steve has worked for daily newspapers in New York, Connecticut and Maine and served as the State House reporter for the Sun Journal since 2016. The Maine Press Association named him Maine's Journalist of the Year in 2022. Among his other awards are the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2016 Ethics in Journalism Award, the I.F. Stone Whistle-Blower Award in 2015 and the Bob Wallack Community Journalism Award from the New England Newspaper & Press Association. Steve is a founder and board president of Youth Journalism International, a charity that teaches students around the globe about news writing, media literacy and issues of the day. His wife, Jackie Majerus, serves as its executive director. Born in Massachusetts, he grew up in a military family that took him to Norway, Ohio and Virginia, where he earned a degree in history from the University of Virginia. He and Jackie live in Auburn. They have two adult children, two collies and not enough time.
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Maine
Lewiston looks to Harlem programs to spur change
Officials see an opportunity to copy some Harlem Children’s Zone programs to help combat poverty in troubled neighborhoods.
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Posted inMaine, Nation / World, News, Politics
Social Security administrators say their agency is getting barraged with scam complaints
A Senate hearing led by U.S. Sen. Susan Collins on Wednesday delved into a growing problem of con artists impersonating government officials to cheat Americans out of their savings.
Posted inNation / World, News
Kapow! Black artists break the comic book mold
Five African-American artists talked recently about making their way through the changing world of comic books.
Posted inNation / World, News
Kapow! Black artists break the comic book mold
Five African-American artists talked recently about making their way through the changing world of comic books.
Posted inBusiness, Lewiston-Auburn, Maine
Three decades late, Small Business Administration eyes help for rural Maine
Federal bureaucrats never established the Office of Rural Affairs when it was mandated in 1990, but after a California representative took action to get it going, financial assistance for business development in states like Maine may finally get off the ground.
Posted inLewiston-Auburn, Maine
Bates focuses on social justice on Martin Luther King Jr. Day
The Lewiston college community, with many area residents in attendance, eyes issues related to inequity and bias in everything from the college’s origin to children’s picture books.
Posted inbPlus
When fat men’s clubs were big
During the mid to late 1880s and early 1900s, fat men’s clubs had a hefty presence in the U.S. A newspaper in Indiana in 1870 reported that the Fat Men’s Association of New York had agreed that men had to weigh at least 200 pounds to join. But, its members genially allowed that “a falling […]
Posted inbPlus
1870 Fat Men convention consumed Lewiston-Auburn in a big weigh
Exactly 150 years ago the Fat Men of Maine gathered in the Twin Cities for a day of festivities and, of course, eating.
Posted inMaine
Fears of a cult takeover roil a tiny town in northern Maine
The purported cult leader is calling on his followers near and far to move to St. Agatha, whose residents aren’t happy about the idea.