BANGOR – Maine Times, once the bastion of dissenting opinion in the state, closed Monday when owner Christopher Hutchins announced to the staff late in the day that no more issues of the weekly statewide newspaper would be printed. Hutchins purchased the paper in April 1999. Now, three years later, almost to the day, he was forced to fire the staff of five reporters, he said, because of stagnant circulation.

“My dream was that I would be able to deliver a wonderful newspaper where people could be informed intelligently about the state of Maine,” Hutchins, founder and president of Alternative Energy Inc. in Bangor, said Tuesday. “I wanted a great weekly paper in Maine. I did not achieve my goal of developing the Maine Times into a must-read.”

Peter Cox and John N. Cole, two renegade reporters, founded the Maine Times in 1968 as a feisty and mouthy “journal of opinion.” Within a year, there were 6,000 subscribers. Cole left in 1977, and Cox sold the paper in 1985 to Dodge Morgan, a wealthy businessman in Portland. For more than a decade, the paper tried to resuscitate under various leadership, but never recovered its dynamic voice.

“I don’t think Chris ever really knew what to do with the paper,” said Cole, whose monthly column is one of the casualties. “This is not like the old Maine Times folding. It’s another paper altogether, and every time another paper goes, it’s sad. But a small publication has to make a big statement, and it never did with Chris. It was too careful. If you’re going to be small, you can’t be middle-of-the-road.”

Hutchins, whose family owns Dead River Co., decided to buy the paper after a Bangor Daily News story in February 1999 reported Maine Times’ board of directors had suspended operations because of a financial crisis. When he acquired the weekly, circulation had sunk to 1,200. As publisher, he invested $3 million attempting to reinvigorate the paper. More recently, circulation was at 3,600, according to Hutchins. Even distributing 2,500 free copies of the paper in York County earlier this year yielded a mere two additional subscriptions.

“I had believed explicitly that the Maine Times needed to be read by people in Maine,” said Hutchins. “But if we were only able to entertain an audience of 3,600, it wasn’t going to happen. If you do the math, I may have had more subscribers if I sent them a check every week instead of a newspaper.”

Editorial differences also contributed to Hutchins’ decision to end the paper, he said. While national news centered on world events, Hutchins wanted the gaze of the Maine Times to remain exclusively on Maine. He also was in favor of including cartoons and syndicated stories. He also was discouraged with the printing quality of the final product each week.

The death knell came, however, when a Portland consulting agency advised Hutchins to spend half a million dollars on a marketing campaign to increase subscriptions to 10,000 in a year and 20,000 in five years.

“My goals were 20,000 last year and we weren’t there,” said Hutchins. “We asked 23 percent of our subscribers: Do you subscribe to a weekly? They said they couldn’t remember. Then we asked: Do you subscribe to the Maine Times? And they said: ‘Yes, I subscribe.’ It was devastating.”

Staff writers at the paper also were devastated by the abrupt dismissal on Monday but knew when Hutchins called a meeting late in the day that it was a coin toss as to whether the news would be good or bad. “Shock” was how one reporter described the general response of the staff. And at least one reporter called the NEWS Wednesday morning to pitch a story originally intended for this week’s issue of Maine Times.

“We have a young staff of writers who were the nucleus of a good staff,” said editor Jay Davis. “We were starting to make some real progress. If I could, I would love to work with them again.”

Davis, a veteran Maine Times reporter, said low subscription rates had been a conundrum to him.

“I never understood why more people didn’t read it,” he said. “The Maine Times has had an honorable and important place in Maine as an independent voice that looked at issues with a hard eye. It’s going to be sorely missed.”

Maine Times may, indeed, have a reincarnation in spite of its repeated obituaries. While the paper will no longer be printed and has officially folded, Hutchins has not sold the company.

“The Maine Times may come back as a different animal. We’re looking at that. It may come back as a monthly but not in a newsprint format.”