Above his office desk, Alex Seitz-Wald keeps a collection of framed press badges, souvenirs from his decade as a political reporter for NBC News in Washington D.C. They represent a past chapter.
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Earlier this year, Seitz-Wald made a bold career pivot. He left the perceived stability of NBC for a deputy editor role at the Midcoast Villager, a weekly newspaper in Camden, Maine, with a circulation of roughly 5,000. He traded presidential campaign trails for local stories, like a recent lead piece on a lawsuit involving a woman who claimed a local animal adoption center traumatized her dog. His features now include profiles of local figures, such as a Waldo County man who created a board game called ‘Homestead or Die’—hailed as ‘An Extremely Maine Board Game Unlike Any Other.’
“I did an insane thing,” admitted Seitz-Wald, 39, from the Villager’s offices in a converted mill in downtown Camden. “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.”
The move came with a 50 percent pay cut, an even steeper reduction than the paper’s initial offer. Yet, far from showing apprehension, Seitz-Wald radiates joy and deep satisfaction when discussing his choice to embrace small-town life and help steer a local news outlet.
Seitz-Wald isn’t the only ‘urban transplant’ at the Villager, which recently marked its first anniversary. Editor-in-chief Willy Blackmore previously resided in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, working for a digital media startup and as a senior editor for New York magazine’s design blog, Curbed.
Will Bleakley, CEO of the paper’s parent company, dedicated eight years in New York and Maine to product marketing for Meta’s media teams.
Publisher Aaron Britt began his journalism career in D.C. as a researcher for William Safire, a long-serving columnist for The New York Times, and later spent six years as an editor at the design publication Dwell in San Francisco. Britt’s wife, Drew Himmelstein, a former editor at the local news site Patch, now leads community engagement and solutions journalism for the Villager.
All in their 30s or early 40s, these journalists gravitated to mid-coast Maine—a region celebrated for its rugged shoreline, picturesque islands, thriving food scene, and diverse community, from nature enthusiasts to seasoned fishermen. They’ve injected a sophisticated urban sensibility and national media expertise into an outlet tasked with covering Waldo and Knox counties, home to about 80,000 residents, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from the nearest major city.
The Villager features articles on local government, business, and crime, alongside beautifully illustrated, magazine-style pieces. One recent example was a 1,200-word essay about a houseboat stranded on Owls Head beach, its ‘albatross body listing perilously into the promise of its own obsolescence.’
The author of that essay, Alissa Bennett, a New York-based freelancer, has been photographed by Ryan McGinley for Vogue and hosts a podcast with Lena Dunham. This hints that the Villager is far from a typical small-town paper merely reporting high-school sports scores (though those are included too). In fact, the Villager often reads—and looks—better than many of the struggling city papers across the country.
The decline of local news is evident nationwide. A new Peacock series, ‘The Paper,’ from the creators of ‘The Office,’ highlights this trend by following the fictional Toledo Truth Teller, a once-great news outlet now filled with wire stories and trivial clickbait.
“Can you believe they used to employ over a thousand people?” a corporate executive for the Truth Teller remarks, casting a scornful eye on the paper’s meager, demoralized staff.
By moving to coastal Maine and joining a 29-person newsroom that includes veteran local reporters, Seitz-Wald and his colleagues at the Villager have achieved what many journalists only dream of: living in a vibrant small community with an excellent quality of life, all while continuing to practice their craft.
One recent Thursday morning, Seitz-Wald, Blackmore, and Britt gathered at the Villager Cafe, located below the paper’s second-floor office. Opened this year, the cafe functions as a staff canteen, a place for reader interaction, and a revenue stream. Here, readers can purchase the Villager for $2.25 and enjoy a tuna melt for $16.
On this particular morning, the paper celebrated its first anniversary with a community day, offering free coffee and doughnuts. The goal was to solicit feedback and perhaps uncover a new story tip.
The main topic of local conversation was the mystery of the ‘kiosk vandal.’ Weeks prior, Camden had installed 30 new parking kiosks, but by the next day, 25 of them were defaced with pink spray-painted hearts, and spray foam insulation filled their card readers.
Seitz-Wald observed a surprising amount of public sympathy for the masked vandal, noting the general unpopularity of the new pay meters.
“It’s Luigi Mangione,” quipped Blackmore, 41, with shoulder-length hair and Birkenstock clogs. As an outsider, he approaches local culture with an anthropological eye. The vandal’s use of a contractor’s material, he added, was ‘very Maine.’
In the back, Britt, the publisher, chatted with Audra Caler, Camden’s town manager. They had both attended their children’s middle school cross-country meet the previous evening.
Britt, 44, a genial man with sweeping brown hair and tortoiseshell glasses, seemed to thrive in his small-town existence.
Beyond his role at the Villager, he co-hosts a show on WRFR, a local radio station. He’d wanted to do similar work in Brooklyn, his most recent home with Himmelstein, but felt ‘New York felt impenetrable.’
“We’ve gone full Maine,” Britt smiled, comparing it to driving ‘old Volvos’ and owning ‘a black lab. Her name is Mona.’
Britt hadn’t set out to be a newspaper publisher. He’d left news media years ago, most recently working at a healthcare startup. Like many of his colleagues, he was recruited for an experiment: to create a local paper that is dynamic, ambitious, and profitable, defying the industry’s decline.
The Villager emerged from the merger of four mid-coast newspapers—the Free Press, Courier-Gazette, Camden Herald, and The Republican Journal. All were once owned by Reade Brower, an unconventional figure dubbed ‘the media mogul of Maine’ by The New York Times, whom Britt playfully described as ‘a genius of postage.’
Brower, 69, built his empire from a direct-mail company he started in a shed behind his Camden home. At one point, he owned six of Maine’s seven daily newspapers and over a dozen weeklies. By 2023, many of these papers were operating at a loss, and he was ready to sell.
Brower enlisted Kathleen Capetta, a native Mainer and former editor-in-chief of the local lifestyle magazine Down East, to assess the newspaper operations and chart a path forward. Their decision was to consolidate the four remaining papers into a single, viable, profitable entity: the Midcoast Villager.
Capetta, 42, didn’t have to search far for new talent.
During the pandemic, Camden and its surrounding towns experienced an influx of new residents, drawn by the scenery and slower pace of life, much like summer visitors for decades. Remote work enabled them to stay beyond Labor Day.
In 2020, Britt, Himmelstein, and their two sons moved from Brooklyn to Rockland, where her family’s roots run deep, and they never looked back. Seitz-Wald and his wife, Lucia Graves, a freelance journalist, followed a couple of years later, relocating from D.C. to nearby Lincolnville, Maine, primarily to care for his ailing mother.
Blackmore, a great-grandson of book publisher John Farrar, had moved from Los Angeles to Maine in 2017, following friends who had settled there. He returned to Brooklyn two years later, but the pandemic eventually brought him back to the area.
Other team members, like Elizabeth McAvoy, the Villager’s art director, were Mainers who had left (in her case, to New York, where she worked as a footwear designer) but felt a strong pull to return home in recent years.
“I knew so many great people here,” Capetta said. “I thought, ‘Why not have that national talent?’ I just needed to court them.”
The modest salaries were not the primary draw, but many were accustomed to such pay. Himmelstein was working at a nonprofit, Blackmore was freelancing, and Seitz-Wald was generating extra income by renting out his D.C. home.
The stunning vistas from Camden’s harbor or a hike up Mount Battie on a sunny day—and the work-life balance to enjoy them—were compelling incentives. So was the unique opportunity to build a local newspaper from the ground up, within the very community they now called home.
In a struggling industry where newspapers are often stripped for parts, many former employees of the folded papers now work at the Villager.
The newsroom veterans include Glenn Billington, 70, who has been selling ads since 1989 and writes a local history column titled ‘The Groundskeeper.’ Dan Dunkle, 52, the executive news editor, meticulously covers Camden and Rockport. Stephen Betts, 66, a beat reporter who has reported on the mid-coast since 1981, is known for an answering machine message that quips, ‘Sorry, I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m out defending the First Amendment.’
It was Betts who broke a major story over the summer when local woman Sunshine Stewart was murdered while paddleboarding at a nearby lake, a case that garnered national attention.
Betts, who keeps a police scanner in his kitchen, filed a motion with the judge to make the proceedings public, becoming the first reporter to reveal the teenage male suspect’s name. He even appeared on ‘Good Morning America’ to discuss the case.
“Dude is a machine,” Seitz-Wald remarked about Betts.
Last month, as part of its ongoing coverage, the Villager sued the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office to obtain the suspect’s family’s phone records.
Dunkle, a thoughtful newsroom veteran, recalled wanting financial stability for his family a few years ago, amidst the industry’s struggles.
“I went to work at a hospital in P.R.,” he recounted. “I lasted four days.”
Now content at his computer, typing his latest story, Dunkle reflected, “I ended up with all the other vagabonds — in journalism.”
By all accounts, Brower, who is known for going almost everywhere barefoot, is a hands-off owner—a politically moderate anti-Rupert Murdoch who claims a personal investment in the Villager’s future.
“I have narrowed my circle to closer to home,” 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 start of the year, the Villager sold approximately 1,300 papers weekly on newsstands. That number has now risen to over 1,700, according to Britt.
However, the paper is still working to become profitable. “Like a lot of media brands, the key for us is diversifying and increasing our lines of revenue,” Britt explained.
Britt’s vision extends beyond the cafe (Brower’s brainchild) to other innovative income-generating initiatives, often leveraging Maine’s natural beauty. Earlier this month, the Villager hosted its first writer’s retreat in Camden, where participants paid $2,600 for a weekend of harbor walks, yoga, and writing workshops led by author Lyz Lenz. Last April, the paper organized a live storytelling evening at the Camden Opera House. Brower’s media company also owns a local inn.
Nevertheless, in the landscape of 2025 journalism, Blackmore must manage his newsroom akin to a Depression-era home cook, stretching scarce resources to produce a rich and substantial product. As the incoming editor, he was allocated only one new hire: a staff photographer.
Blackmore cites the L.A. Weekly of the mid-2000s as his inspiration, particularly 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,” Blackmore recalled, with a magazine editor’s keen eye for content blend. “Reading that paper made you feel excited about the place you lived.”
Under Blackmore’s direction, the paper now boasts visual flair and compelling writing across themed supplements released throughout the year, including ‘Garden,’ ‘Home,’ a ‘summer guide,’ and a ‘gift guide.’ They also conduct a ‘Best of the Best’ reader’s poll and mail out an events calendar. Experienced freelancers cover the neighboring islands with the same depth and perspective typically seen from foreign bureau chiefs in major metropolitan papers.
Blackmore and Seitz-Wald are approaching local lore with fresh eyes, as evidenced by a recent front-page story about a high-profile art theft at the Camden Library in the 1970s that remains unsolved.
Yet, a crucial question remains: Can a local paper led by journalists who have recently arrived truly capture the essence of living here? The idealized, postcard version of Maine doesn’t always reflect the authentic local experience.
Meg Quijano, 82, whose family has owned the Smiling Cow gift shop in Camden since 1940, expressed a longing for the old Herald, which possessed “a very low-key, hometown feel.”
Quijano has mixed feelings about the Villager. “I don’t want to denigrate a newspaper because I believe in small-town newspapers,” she stated. But, in her view, the Villager doesn’t resonate with the local community in the same way. She has not subscribed.
Regarding whether outsiders can truly create a newspaper that connects with locals like her, Quijano simply said: “If you’re a Mainer you’d say no, because that’s the way Mainers are.”
Seitz-Wald insists he is genuinely striving to become an integral part of the community he covers—to “listen and not move fast and break things,” and to uphold the rich legacy of these newspapers, some of which have been publishing since 1829.
Challenges persist, of course. “I do miss the corporate card,” Seitz-Wald confessed, reflecting on his previous job. “I don’t miss the hustle. I do sometimes worry about the stability,” at the Villager.
Seitz-Wald met his wife at a news conference on Capitol Hill. As he remembers it, their initial conversation foreshadowed their current life.
“Our first conversation was, ‘Yeah, D.C., is fine, but it would be nice to live in a small community by the sea.’”
Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.