Gagnon is in the house: Well, actually Matthew Gagnon, the editor-in-chief of Pine Tree Politics is still far from home, working for a new-media political consultant in Arlington, Va. But since leaving the employ of Republican U.S. Sen. Susan Collins last month, Gagnon has returned to posting on PTP, which went silent under a fill-in editor after May 17.

General Henry Knox, a Revolutionary War hero and U.S. Secretary of War in the country’s early days, was no stranger to political controversy. But the museum established at Montpelier, his home in Thomaston, seems like an unlikely site for an ideological flap generated by the attention of a national right-wing media watchdog.

Frank, Wolf and Bach for sale: According to the North East Radio Watch Web site, citing a June 30 report from Inside Radio, Nassau Broadcasting will be selling off all ten of its Maine radio stations over the next year and a half.

The Lewiston Sun Journal’s editors must have thought the Associated Press story about a new survey of college costs was big news. Why else would they have put it on the front page on June 30? (The story doesn’t seem to be on the Sun Journal’s Web site, but here’s a link to the same piece published elsewhere.) 

The Portland radio market just got a lot bigger. According to the rating service Arbitron, the estimated size of the metro Portland market it surveys will now include 856,900 people or almost two-thirds of the population of Maine. That change boosts Portland from the 168th largest market in the country to the 89th.

CW-TV: Colin Woodard, investigative journalist and contributing editor to this Web site’s parent magazine, might soon be joining NBC’s prime-time lineup. According to Deadline.com, Woodard’s nonfiction book “The Republic of Pirates” has been optioned to the network for a possible series.

Hits and misses: My recent posting on the top twenty-five news websites in Maine generated a lot of criticism from those who claimed their sites’ unique monthly visitors were undercounted by Compete.com’s methodology.

They appear to have a point. But it also appears that while those monthly visitor figures may matter to their advertisers, they don’t make much difference in terms of their rankings among the top sites.

Anniversary assertions: MaineToday Media celebrated the second anniversary of its purchase of the Portland Press Herald, Kennebec Journal, and Morning Sentinel with a special supplement in the June 19 papers (it doesn’t seem to be available online). It featured the usual gushy stuff about the company’s accomplishments since the sale and honored those employees with long terms of service (not many reporters, though, since most of those with extensive experience have departed and been replaced by rookies).

Web master: The Portland Press Herald circulates more print copies than any newspaper in the state, outselling the Bangor Daily News by more than 4,000 copies on the average weekday, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. 

Irregular news judgment: The June 10 release of a state report on last December’s ski-lift accident at Sugarloaf was big news – everywhere but in the ski resort’s backyard.