About The Maine Agenda
The Maine Agenda is a local guide to the best of Greater Portland, Maine: golf, tennis and pickleball, restaurants, the outdoors, and everything worth doing within about 25 minutes of downtown. It is written by people who live here and actually play these courses, book these courts, walk these trails, and eat at these restaurants.
We are not a tourist guide. We cover venues and experiences we genuinely believe in. When something is overpriced or overrated, we say so. When something is great, we explain exactly why. Saying what to skip is part of the job.
How we research and verify
Most local "best of" lists rank by star ratings and review counts. Those numbers measure who is motivated to post, not how good a place actually is. We rank differently: by measurable fact and verifiable credential.
In practice that means we work from primary sources, not aggregators. Course specs, hours, prices, and programs come from the venue itself. Golf course ratings, slopes and yardages come from the course's own scorecard or the operating town's facility page, cross-checked against the Maine State Golf Association listing; the USGA's national rating database is not readable without a browser session, so we do not cite it, and where a course publishes no rating we leave the number out rather than borrow one from a directory. Court counts, park fees, and public hours come from town recreation departments. Event dates come from the organizers directly, checked against the calendar rather than a search summary that may be quoting last year. When a claim cannot be verified against a primary source, we say so plainly or we leave it out. We would rather publish one number we can stand behind than five we cannot.
Every venue in every guide is verified as currently operating before publication, and guides are re-checked as facts change. The "Updated" date on an article means we re-verified the facts on that day, not that we changed a word for the sake of it.
How to reach us
Use the contact form. It goes straight to the people who write the site, and you do not need to be a subscriber to use it. We want corrections most of all: if a price, an hour, a fee, or a court count on this site is wrong, tell us and we will verify it against the primary source and fix the page. Press and media enquiries, venues that want a factual error corrected, town departments, and anyone asking us to link to or cite their data all go to the same form.
One honest caveat about speed. We read everything that comes in, and we reply to what needs a reply, but this is a small operation and we check the queue rather than sitting in an inbox. If your message is time-sensitive, say so in the first line.
The other way to follow along is the free newsletter: the things actually worth knowing about in Greater Portland, written the same way the guides are. No edition has gone out yet, so anyone who signs up now is on the first one. Every edition carries a one-click unsubscribe.