Newspaper’s Founders to Depart

Zendelle Bouchard holds a copy of the first print edition of the Sanford Springvale News from September 2020.

Photo: Gail Burnett

By Gail Burnett

Zendelle Bouchard never intended to make a long career of producing a weekly paper for her adopted hometown. In fact, she never intended to be a journalist at all. But after the pandemic derailed a project she and her husband Dave Rude were working on, they decided to try and fill the news gap that existed in town since the weekly Sanford News ceased publication in 2017.

The Sanford Springvale News website launched in June 2020, and the first print edition of the paper – about 300 copies, four pages entirely written by Bouchard, no ads – debuted a few months later. Covid was making everybody’s lives more difficult, but it actually helped make Bouchard’s thorough reporting possible. Instead of having to trudge to City Hall to watch municipal meetings as they were happening, she was able to watch them from home on her own schedule. She got to know city and school officials and tapped into online sources of information. Local marketing professional Liz Kilkenny volunteered to bring in some revenue by selling ads.

Now, four years after publishing that first edition and a year after a group of volunteers joined her and Rude to keep it going, she says they’ve decided it’s time to step down. “I always wanted it to be a group effort,” she said.

Bouchard grew up in the Boston area with “news junkie” parents. “Every Sunday morning, it was the Boston Globe and honey-dipped donuts,” she said. She later moved to New Hampshire, where for a while she and Rude published the Litchfield Bulletin community newsletter for that small town. News was never their main occupation, though. Rude worked in manufacturing and Bouchard, who describes herself as someone who gets easily bored, has had a varied career, including working as a CNA, home care aide, assistant bookstore manager and office assistant. For many years she has bought and sold collectible dolls through Etsy and other venues.

The couple moved to Sanford in 2010, but Bouchard’s family has deep roots here. Her mother grew up in the area and was descended from the Deering family, which gave its name to Deering Ridge, Deering Pond and other landmarks. Bouchard’s interest in history initially led her to the idea of an online calendar that would let people know about happenings at Maine’s historical societies and museums. When the pandemic hit and all events were cancelled, the couple revived the old Litchfield Bulletin format and went to work publishing local news instead.

Producing the Sanford Springvale News on their own proved so taxing that after about three years, Bouchard announced she was done. Kilkenny had moved on, and selling ads proved to be too much of a burden in addition to their other duties. Rude continued to compile the SSN’s events calendar, but Bouchard said it was time to call it quits. The announcement shocked the paper’s by-then thousands of readers, and a group, led by former School Committee member Kendra Williams, started working to turn the three-person show into the work of more than a dozen volunteers. The print edition has grown to 12 pages most weeks, and the group maintains a website, Facebook page and E-newsletter with thousands of followers. The project is launched, and Bouchard is ready to move on to the next idea: a book based on the real-life diary of a 19th-century Acton farm boy.

She will take many things with her, she said, but probably the most important is that by producing the newspaper, she saw up-close the hard work and thought that goes into running our small city, from City Manager Steve Buck and the dedicated department heads to staff at all levels.

“I came to understand how lucky we are to live here,” she said. “It’s really made me appreciate what a great place Sanford is.”