Judy Meyer

Notable work and positions

The Maine Monitor — Editor, Monitor Local
Sun Journal, Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel — Executive Editor (2015–2025)
Maine Freedom of Information Coalition — President
New England First Amendment Coalition — Board member

Biography

Judy Meyer is a Maine journalist and editor known for her decades-long advocacy for government transparency and public-records access. She began as a freelance writer for the Lewiston Sun Journal in 1990, covering the rural Oxford Hills communities of western Maine, and went on to serve nearly 35 years at the paper, rising to executive editor of the Sun Journal, Kennebec Journal, Morning Sentinel, and the Sun Media Group's western Maine weeklies. Her reporting on the state's Freedom of Access Act, including a story that led most Maine counties to stop using a for-profit incarceration records service, shaped her career-long focus on open government. She served on the Maine Legislature's Right to Know Advisory Committee, as vice president and later president of the Maine Freedom of Information Coalition, and on the board of the New England First Amendment Coalition, serving as its board president in 2022. Meyer was named Maine's Journalist of the Year in 2003, received the New England Newspaper & Press Association's Judith Vance Weld Brown Spirit of Journalism Award in 2018, and was inducted into the Maine Press Association's Hall of Fame in 2022. She stepped down as Sun Journal executive editor in February 2025 and now edits Monitor Local, a hyperlocal reporting initiative of the nonprofit Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting covering rural Oxford, Franklin, Somerset, and Washington counties.