On the wall above his office cubicle, Alex Seitz-Wald displays mementos from his journalism career. Framed behind glass are dozens of press badges from the decade he spent as a political reporter for NBC News in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Seitz-Wald hasn’t left journalism, but earlier this year, he did make a drastic career change. He quit NBC and took a job as deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, a weekly newspaper in Camden, Me., with a circulation of about 5,000.
He once covered presidential campaigns, but Mr. Seitz-Wald now edits a newsroom that recently had a lead story involving a lawsuit by a woman who says a local animal adoption center traumatized her dog. He also writes slice-of-life features for the paper: The Oct. 2 edition included his profile of a Waldo County man who invented a board game called “Homestead or Die” (Headline: “An Extremely Maine Board Game Unlike Any Other”).
“I did an insane thing,” Mr. Seitz-Wald, 39, said, sitting in the converted mill in downtown Camden where the Villager has its offices. “I left one of the last stable jobs in media and took a job in the worst sector of media — and possibly in the economy.”
To do so, he took a 50 percent pay cut. The paper’s initial offer, he said, was even lower. Yet far from looking uneasy, Mr. Seitz-Wald wore an expression of joy, even deep satisfaction, as he discussed his decision to move to this pretty seaside town and help lead a local news outlet.
Mr. Seitz-Wald is not the only urban transplant at the Villager, which celebrated its first year in business last month.
The editor in chief, Willy Blackmore, has lived in Los Angeles and Brooklyn and worked for a digital media start-up and as a senior editor for New York magazine’s design blog, Curbed.
Will Bleakley, the chief executive of the paper’s parent company, spent eight years in New York and Maine working in product marketing for Meta’s media teams.
The publisher, Aaron Britt, got his start in journalism in D.C., as a researcher for William Safire, the longtime columnist for The New York Times, and spent six years in San Francisco, as an editor at the design publication Dwell. Mr. Britt’s wife, Drew Himmelstein, a former editor at Patch, the local news site, is now head of community engagement and solutions journalism for the Villager.
All in their 30s or early 40s, they each found themselves in mid-coast Maine, a region known for its rocky coastline, pine-tree dotted islands, vibrant food scene and interesting mix of people, from granola types to coastal grandmothers to fishermen. They have brought a cosmopolitan sensibility and national media chops to an outlet whose mission is to cover two counties — Waldo and Knox — with a combined population of about 80,000 people, three and a half hours from the nearest big city.
Open the Villager and you’ll find articles on local government, business and crime alongside handsomely-illustrated, magazine-style features, like a 1,200-word essay about a houseboat marooned on Owls Head beach, “its albatross body listing perilously into the promise of its own obsolescence.”
The author of that article, Alissa Bennett, is a New York-based freelancer who was photographed by Ryan McGinley for Vogue and hosts a podcast with Lena Dunham. That’s just one hint this is not another small-town rag printing high-school sports scores (though that’s in the mix, too). Indeed, the Villager reads — and looks — better than a lot of fading city papers.
For evidence of that decline, one can look almost anywhere in the country, but consider the example featured on “The Paper,” a new series on Peacock by the creators of “The Office.” The show follows a once-great news outlet, the fictional Toledo Truth Teller, whose content is now a mix of wire stories and vapid click bait.
“Can you believe they used to employ over a thousand people?” one of the Truth Teller’s corporate overlords says, introducing the tiny, demoralized staff with disdain.
In relocating to coastal Maine and joining a newsroom of 29 employees that includes veteran local reporters, Mr. Seitz-Wald and his colleagues at the Villager have done something many journalists may dream of but deem impossible today — live in a smaller community with a great quality of life, yet still ply their trade.
On a recent Thursday morning, Mr. Seitz-Wald, Mr. Blackmore and Mr. Britt were milling inside the Villager Cafe, which is downstairs from the paper’s second-floor office and opened this year. It’s a staff canteen, a way to meet readers and a source of a revenue for the paper: Readers can scoop up a copy of the Villager for $2.25 and order a tuna melt for $16.
On this morning, the paper was toasting its first anniversary with a community day featuring free coffee and doughnuts. The idea was to get feedback on how the staff was doing, and maybe a story tip.
The big topic of discussion around town was the identity of the kiosk vandal. Weeks earlier, the city of Camden had installed 30 parking kiosks; the next day, 25 of them had been covered in pink spray-painted hearts. Spray foam insulation had also been squirted into the card readers.
There was a surprising amount of public sympathy for the hooded vandal, Mr. Seitz-Wald noted. The pay meters were unpopular.
“It’s Luigi Mangione,” quipped Mr. Blackmore, 41, who has hair past his shoulders and was wearing Birkenstock clogs. As an outsider, he takes an anthropological view of the local culture. The vandal’s use of a contractor’s material, Mr. Blackmore added, was “very Maine.”
At a table in the back, Mr. Britt, the publisher, was chatting with Audra Caler, Camden’s town manager. The two had been at the same cross-country meet the evening before for the middle school their children attend.
A big, schmoozy guy with swoopy brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses, Mr. Britt, 44, seemed to be flourishing in his small-town life.
Aside from his job at the Villager, he co-hosts a show on WRFR, a local radio station. He’d wanted to do that in Brooklyn, where he and Ms. Himmelstein had lived most recently, but “New York felt impenetrable,” he said.
“We’ve gone full Maine,” Mr. Britt smiled, likening that to driving “old Volvos” and owning “a black lab. Her name is Mona.”
Mr. Britt had not aspired to be a newspaper publisher. He’d left news media years ago and had recently been working at a health care start-up. Like many of his colleagues, he’d been recruited for an experiment: to produce a local paper that’s exciting, ambitious and profitable, rather than in its death throes.
The Villager was formed from the consolidation of four mid-coast newspapers — the Free Press, Courier-Gazette, Camden Herald and The Republican Journal. All were owned by Reade Brower, an eccentric figure The New York Times once called “the media mogul of Maine,” and whom Mr. Britt described as “a genius of postage.”
Mr. Brower, 69, built an empire on a direct-mail company he started in a shed behind his house in Camden. At one point, he owned six of Maine’s seven dailies, and more than a dozen weeklies. By 2023, he was ready to sell those papers, many of which were operating at a loss.
Mr. Brower hired Kathleen Capetta, a native Mainer and the former editor in chief of the local lifestyle magazine Down East, to analyze the newspaper operations and figure out the way forward. They decided the four papers he had retained would become one viable, moneymaking outlet, the Midcoast Villager.
For her new hires, Ms. Capetta, 42, didn’t have to look too far.
During the pandemic, Camden and the surrounding towns saw an influx of transplants drawn to the area by the scenery and slow pace of life, as summer visitors have been for decades. Remote work allowed them to stay past Labor Day.
In 2020, Mr. Britt, Ms. Himmelstein and their two sons left Brooklyn for Rockland, where her family goes back generations, and never looked back. Mr. Seitz-Wald and his wife, Lucia Graves, a freelance journalist, followed a couple years later, moving from D.C., to nearby Lincolnville, Me., in large part so he could care for his ailing mother.
Mr. Blackmore, a great-grandson of the book publisher John Farrar, had left Los Angeles for Maine in 2017, following some friends who had relocated there. Two years later, he moved to Brooklyn, but the pandemic brought him back to the area.
Others, like Elizabeth McAvoy, the Villager’s art director, were Mainers who had moved away (in her case to New York, where she worked as a footwear designer) but felt the pull toward home in recent years.
“I knew so many great people here,” Ms. Capetta said. “I thought, ‘Why not have that national talent?’ I just needed to court them.”
The modest salary was not an enticement, but they were somewhat used to modest salaries. Ms. Himmelstein was working at a nonprofit, Mr. Blackmore had been freelancing and Mr. Seitz-Wald was renting out his D.C. house for extra income.
The view from Camden’s harbor or a hike up Mount Battie on a sunny day — and the work flexibility to enjoy it — was incentive in itself. So was the rare chance to create a local newspaper from the ground up, in the same community where you live.
In a shrinking industry where newspapers are typically stripped for parts, many of the employees of the folded papers are now working at the Villager.
The newsroom veterans include Glenn Billington, 70, who has been selling ads since 1989 and writes a local history column, “The Groundskeeper”; Dan Dunkle, 52, the executive news editor who chronicles Camden and Rockport; and Stephen Betts, 66, a beat reporter who has covered the mid-coast since 1981 and whose answering machine message says, “Sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m out defending the First Amendment.”
It was Mr. Betts who delivered the Villager a big scoop over the summer, when a local woman, Sunshine Stewart, was murdered while paddle boarding at a nearby lake, in a case that drew national attention.
Mr. Betts, who keeps a police scanner in his kitchen, filed a motion with the judge to make the proceeding public, becoming the first reporter to reveal the teenage male suspect’s name. He appeared on “Good Morning America” to talk about the case.
“Dude is a machine,” Mr. Seitz-Wald said of Mr. Betts.
Last month, as part of its ongoing coverage of the case, the Villager sued the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office to retain the suspect’s family’s phone records.
Mr. Dunkle, a bearded newsroom philosopher, said that a few years ago, as his industry was struggling, he wanted to give his family financial stability.
“I went to work at a hospital in P.R.,” he said. “I lasted four days.”
Hunkered behind his computer typing up his latest story, Mr. Dunkle was content with his lot in life. “I ended up with all the other vagabonds — in journalism,” he said.
By all accounts, Mr. Brower, who goes almost everywhere barefoot, is a hands-off owner — a politically moderate anti-Rupert Murdoch who said he has a personal stake in the Villager’s future.
“I have narrowed my circle to closer to home,” Mr. Brower wrote in an email. “True success is walking into the cafe and seeing neighbors talking to each other. It’s resurrecting the relevancy of community stories and reminding people that we are humans and neighbors first.”
At the beginning of the year, the Villager was selling around 1,300 papers per week on the newsstand. That number is now over 1,700, according to Mr. Britt.
The paper, though, is still working its way out of the red. “Like a lot of media brands, the key for us is diversifying and increasing our lines of revenue,” he said.
Mr. Britt was referring not only to the cafe (Mr. Brower’s idea), but also to other efforts to drum up income, in part by monetizing Maine’s beauty. Earlier this month, the Villager held its first writer’s retreat in Camden; participants paid $2,600 for a weekend of harbor walks, yoga and writing workshops led by the author Lyz Lenz. Last April, the paper hosted a live storytelling evening at the Camden Opera House. Mr. Brower’s media company also operates a local inn.
Still, this being journalism in 2025, Mr. Blackmore must run the newsroom like a home cook during the Great Depression, stretching out thin resources to make a nourishing meal. He was given one hiring slot as incoming editor, which he used to bring in a lone staff photographer.
Mr. Blackmore said he was inspired by the L.A. Weekly of the mid-aughts, when its food critic, Jonathan Gold, won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
“They used to do big features, bitsy stuff, good food writing, muckraking on city government,” said Mr. Blackmore, who has a magazine editor’s focus on the mix. “Reading that paper made you feel excited about the place you lived.”
Under his tenure, Mr. Blackmore has brought visual flair and great writing to themed supplements that appear throughout the year, including Garden, Home, a summer guide and a gift guide. There is also a “Best of the Best” reader’s poll, and an events calendar mailed to readers. Seasoned freelancers cover the neighboring islands the way foreign bureau chiefs do — or did — at metropolitan papers.
Mr. Blackmore and Mr. Seitz-Wald are mining the local lore with fresh eyes, as they did with a recent front-page story about a high-profile art theft at the Camden Library in the 1970s that remains unsolved.
But the question stands: Can a local paper led by journalists who have dropped in fully capture what it’s like to live here? The postcard version of Maine is not the real place.
Meg Quijano, 82, whose family has run the Smiling Cow gift shop in Camden since 1940, said she misses the Herald, which had “a very low-key, hometown feel.”
Ms. Quijano has mixed feelings about the Villager. “I don’t want to denigrate a newspaper because I believe in small-town newspapers,” she said. But in her opinion, the Villager doesn’t speak to the local community in the same way. She has not subscribed.
As to whether outsiders can make a newspaper that speaks to locals like her, Ms. Quijano said: “If you’re a Mainer you’d say no, because that’s the way Mainers are.”
Mr. Seitz-Wald says he is earnestly attempting to be a member of the community he’s covering — to “listen and not move fast and break things,” and to steward the legacy of newspapers that in the oldest example have been publishing since 1829.
It has its challenges. “I do miss the corporate card,” Mr. Seitz-Wald said of his former job in journalism. “I don’t miss the hustle. I do sometimes worry about the stability,” at the Villager.
Mr. Seitz-Wald met his wife at a news conference on Capitol Hill. As he remembered it, the meeting foretold their future.
“Our first conversation was, “‘Yeah, D.C., is fine, but it would be nice to live in a small community by the sea.’”
Read by Steven Kurutz
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
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