PRESQUE ISLE, Maine — Driving into downtown Presque Isle from the south, thousands of people regularly pass by the Route 1 offices of BurrellesLuce, though many may not have much of an idea of what the company does.
With 128 people on staff, BurrellesLuce’s Presque Isle office is among the Star City’s larger employers and part of a large national company that has been evolving ever since it was founded as a “press clippings” agency in 1888.
“The atmosphere is great, the work is very interesting. I know most everybody here very well,” said Becky Frost, the Presque Isle office’s general manager.
Headquartered in Florham Park, New Jersey, BurrellesLuce specializes in media monitoring and analysis, working for large corporations, nonprofits, governments and public relations agencies.
Using a combination of artificial intelligence software and human analysis, the company helps clients manage their reputations by tracking their coverage in internet, broadcast and print media, said executive vice president Johnna Burke, who works out of the company’s Mesa, Ariz., office.
The Presque Isle location is considered a “production office,” where employees perform monitoring and in-depth analysis for clients, such as demographic research, as well as curation from 3,500 newspapers, among other sources.
This year marks the firm’s 130th year in business — a sign of both longevity and adaptation.
“We started as a very manual process and we’ve integrated technology, just like all other companies have. But we still have a concentration of production areas,” Burke said. “We’ve been in a state of transition and we’re so closely related to the media. It’s constantly evolving.”
BurrellesLuce set up shop in Presque Isle in 1980 and opened its current office a year later. The company credits the decision to open the Presque Isle office in large part to Judy Waggoner (nee Hallowell), the late wife of former CEO Robert Waggoner and mother of current CEO Charles Waggoner. Judy Waggoner grew up in Caribou and helped put Aroostook County on the map within the company as a potential site for an office.
Today, the Presque Isle office remains a key part of the company with a workforce that has a relatively long tenure, said Frost, noting that the average length of service for employees is about 20 years.
Frost, who’s from Fort Fairfield, has worked with the company since 1982, starting as a media reader and working her way up to general manager in 2004.
Burke said that Frost is an example of the long-serving local employees upon whom the national company depends.
“It’s a great community,” she said. “It isn’t a call center model where there’s a lot of turnover.”
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- A newspaper clipping captures the grand opening of the BurrellesLuce office in Presque Isle in 1981. (Courtesy of BurrellesLuce)
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- This photo captured the grand opening of the BurrellesLuce office in Presque Isle in 1981. (Courtesy of BurrellesLuce)
