Alex Seitz-Wald was a high-profile NBC News national political reporter for 10 years when he made a dramatic shift in his professional life: He became deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, a digital-print outlet created from the combination of four coastal Maine community papers and an online site.
Not only is the Midcoast Villager trying to show that a regional approach can improve local news coverage while sustaining a viable business model, but it also is investing in a physical gathering space and artificial intelligence.
The 38-year-old Seitz-Wald exchanged the ever-growing stress of covering the Washington, D.C., political scene for the opportunity to connect with readers who live near his Maine home and to let them know what’s happening in their communities.
“It’s not as much fun to cover politics as it used to be,” Seitz-Wald said. “The national mood is just tough. The industry is also tough, so I had for a while been looking to get out of politics at least, to do something different.”
While still working at NBC, Seitz-Wald moved with his family up to Maine two years ago to help take care of his mother. After the 2024 presidential election, he said, the Villager’s then-publisher approached him about joining the team. “I understood the vision of what they were going for, and I thought it was really cool and exciting,” he said, though, still under contract with NBC, he initially declined the offer. Yet the more he thought about it, the more he was swayed.
“I just got super excited about the idea of helping to build something,” Seitz Wald said. “I’ve been a reporter, but [I would] get to do so much more, and in a place that I love.”
Aaron Britt, 43, also brings national credentials to his new position of Midcoast Villager publisher. Long ago he was William Safire’s “On Language” researcher at the New York Times Magazine, and he spent many years in San Francisco editing at the design-focused Dwell Magazine and writing a San Francisco Chronicle column about style. As with Seitz-Wald, family connections lured him to Maine.
“My wife’s family goes generations back in the town of Rockland, Maine, which is one of the towns that we cover at the Midcoast Villager,” Britt said, noting that his mother-in-law was a local TV journalist in Portland. Britt and his family moved from Brooklyn to Rockland early in the pandemic, and he joined the Villager in September, the month it launched. He was named publisher in January.
“I didn’t necessarily imagine myself there, but what I have always imagined is working for an organization that is creating meaning in the community,” Britt said. “Taking a leadership role at an organization like this is completely natural, and I’m going to get an education along the way.”
Maine media entrepreneur Reade Brower created the Midcoast Villager by rolling up four community papers that he owned in Maine’s Knox and Waldo counties—the Free Press, Courier-Gazette, Republican Journal and Camden Herald—plus the online news site Village Soup. All four papers date back to the 1800s, though the most recent version of the Free Press was launched in 1985 as a Rockland-based alternative weekly.
Brower’s newspaper portfolio used to be much larger. In the summer of 2023, he sold five dailies, including the Portland Press Herald, and more than 20 weeklies to the nonprofit National Trust for Local News, bypassing higher offers from larger regional and national corporate media owners for the publications’ sake, he said. Brower said the sale gave him “a new lease on life,” as he was able to pay off debts he had accumulated over 10 years of putting together his newspaper cluster.
But he held back the four legacy community newspapers in Knox and Waldo counties from the deal. “Part of the reason we didn’t sell the local papers to the Trust was they were broken, and I wanted to fix them,” Brower said, acknowledging that he was “losing a lot of money” on them.
Most people cut four papers and turn them into one to make money. We did it to save our local communities’ newspapers.
Reade Brower, Owner, Midcoast Villager
Brower and his business partner, Kathleen Fluery Capetta, devised the plan to create the Midcoast Villager, a for-profit enterprise that prints weekly and has a paywalled digital site. Capetta, its first publisher, did much of the work to get the team in place, Brower said.
“The idea was to save the local newspapers and create something that had a sustainable future that younger people wanted to read,” Brower said. “Most people cut four papers and turn them into one to make money. We did it to save our local communities’ newspapers.”
Combining without cutting
In Massachusetts, Gannett’s consolidation of community papers has led to dramatic reductions in local coverage in favor of shared regional news. But Britt said the Midcoast Villager has stepped up its commitment to community news while broadening the focus. “As the papers merged, we kept all the staff, everybody from those papers,” Britt said. “To my knowledge we’re the only paper In Maine that is staffing up and not down.”
“We just operate as one newsroom now,” Seitz-Wald said. “We have beats. You’re responsible for geographic areas, but we operate all together.”
Brower said restructuring the business operations didn’t result in job losses either. “The opposite has happened,” he said. “We’ve had to bring in people to fill new roles.”
Seitz-Wald said some of the more “parochial” respondents to the Villager’s reader surveys said, “I only care about what happens in my little town. I don’t care what happens anywhere else.” But, he added, there are “so many regional stories that apply to everyone that I think the papers were not doing beforehand because they didn’t have the perspective or the breadth or the ambition or whatever that we can be doing now. These towns are 20 minutes away from each other. They’re not foreign countries.”
“The paper aims to capture the fact that that is how so many of us live,” Britt said. “You live in Rockland, and Belfast is like 35 minutes away. You’ll go to the restaurants there. You’ll go check out the bookshops and the arts fair. Same again for Belfast people to come to other towns too.”
Emphasizing lifestyle and cultural coverage is one way the Villager aims to broaden its audience. “We’re trying to be fun and engaging,” Seitz-Wald said. “We do all the accountability [journalism] work, but [it’s] also a product that you just enjoy reading. This is not vegetables. This is a full meal.”
This outreach strategy includes the creation of a physical gathering space for readers. The Villager’s newsroom is in Camden, a coastal town with a population of 5,200 that balloons during the summer. In April, the organization plans to open the Villager Café on its building’s ground floor.
“The cafe is a place where not only do we get to host our own events and it’s a great meeting place, but we see it as integral to what we’re trying to do in terms of building community,” Britt said. “We feel like a physical embodiment of the paper is a really interesting and important way to exist, like a community member.”
Facilitating “face-to-face interaction and conversations” also is a way to counteract a growing distrust of the media, Britt added. “It’s easy to shout online and then avoid your neighbors,” he said. “I want a Friday coffee club. Sit around, read the paper, drink a cup, discuss what’s in there.”
“It’s also diversifying revenue streams,” Seitz-Wald said, noting that the café will sell merchandise in addition to serving food and drinks and hosting events. “[We’re] trying to think about a newspaper as not just a newspaper but as a community hub in all ways, shapes and forms.”
The Midcoast Villager is keeping its AI efforts local as well: It is the first client of the Camden-based company Civic Sunlight. That company, co-founder David Mortlock writes, aims to “use AI and automation to make local government more accessible.”
“Their offices are literally a block away from our newsroom,” Seitz-Wald said, noting that he knew of Civic Sunlight co-founder Tom Cochran from their days in Washington, D.C. Cochran is a former chief technology officer at Atlantic Media and managed the Obama administration’s digital platforms as a presidential appointee before also moving to Maine.
Civic Sunlight transcribes and summarizes meetings, enabling the Villager’s reporters to follow up on the newsworthy aspects, Seitz-Wald said. “We simply don’t have the staff to go to every meeting for every town, especially towns that are out on the islands,” he said, counting 43 towns in the coverage area’s two counties. “This is a way for us to see more deeply into what’s happening in local governments all across the region and then use those summaries to inform our reporting.”
It's not as much fun to cover politics as it used to be. The national mood is just tough.
Alex Seitz-Wald, Deputy Editor, Midcoast Villager
He shared a few emails sent out by Civic Sunlight that offered succinct, outlined summaries of various meetings. He stressed that Civic Sunlight’s work is not “audience facing,” and none of its reports or summaries will be published. “It’s just the first step that would lead to a story, then calling people and fact-checking everything,” Seitz-Wald said. “They’re also developing a querying tool, which I’ve played around with a little bit, where you can ask it, ‘How much did this department cost the town last year?’ And it will go back and tell you.”
Added Britt: “It’s a way to invest in the community too. It’s almost too good to be true, the degree to which we are using the most local possible shop, guys whose office is one block away.”
“Our newsroom was the first newsroom that Tom met with,” Seitz-Wald said, “so he’s asking our reporters, ‘What should we be doing? How do we build it? I’m not a journalist. Tell me how to make this product more useful to you.’ That’s just such a crazy opportunity to get in this small town.”
Challenging landscape
Maine’s news landscape remains a challenging one, even without a large corporate chain dominating the scene. “Every state’s a little different, and this one is a little more different than most,” said Rick Edmonds, media business analyst for the Poynter Institute. “It’s a curious mix.” He noted that many print editions in the state have disappeared, prompting news outlets and their readers to make the transition to digital.
The National Trust for Local News has reached an inflection point with co-founder/CEO Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro announcing in late January that she is stepping down. The Boston Globe reported in mid-February that the Trust’s Maine papers “are facing persistent financial losses. Freelance budgets are being cut, newspapers are getting thinner, and a succession of senior leaders have departed. Executives said they can’t rule out layoffs or the wholesale elimination of some print editions.”
At the same time, Brower said early returns on the Midcoast Villager are promising. “The experiment is six months in, and right now we have combined advertising revenues greater than all four papers combined, and we have greater paid circulation than all four papers combined, and we just started,” he said. “We haven’t had a nickel come in from the café or the events, and or the sponsorships.”
Britt said the Villager received a $100,000 grant from the philanthropic Press Forward local news initiative last year, and it is working to secure “a fiscal sponsor, which will allow us to accept tax-deductible donations.” He said advertising revenue “still makes up a very healthy chunk of the financial pie,” and the business community has responded favorably “to a blended print/digital/newsletter-style advertising package.” Consumer revenues, he added, are split relatively evenly among newsstand sales, digital subscriptions and a print-and-digital bundle.
The convergence of Britt, Seitz-Wald, the Civic Sunlight founders and other journalists in coastal Maine speaks to a shifting emphasis on local news. Small outlets across the country are being seeded by veterans of larger news organizations who wish to see the immediate impact of their work in their communities.
“I’m so much happier spending my time on stories and issues that are so tangible and that affect the people around me and that I feel like we have some control over,” Seitz-Wald said. “With these national issues and storylines, you’re just kind of screaming into the void. I mean, I’m only a week and a half into this job, but I can already just see from the reaction it really matters.”
Article image composite by Local News Initiative. Left: Alex Seitz-Wald; Right: Aaron Britt. Both by John Blodgett, courtesy Midcoast Villager
