Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Alex Seitz-Wald is the Deputy Editor of the Midcoast Villager, a weekly print newspaper in Camden, Maine that covers Knox and Waldo counties along Maine’s rural Midcoast region. It was founded in September 2024 as a merger of four legacy newspapers whose roots stretch back to 1829.
The Villager has been on my radar since I moved to Maine earlier this year, not only because it’s a hard-hitting rural newspaper, but also because it’s got an interesting model for revenue and community engagement. The Villager Cafe occupies the ground floor of the newsroom building on Camden’s main street. It opened in May, shortly after Seitz-Wald took the job upstairs. Recently, I paid them a visit because I was curious how it’s all working out.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: To start, would you introduce yourself and tell me how you came to your position as deputy editor at the Midcoast Villager?
Alex Seitz-Wald: I’m Alex Seitz-Wald, the deputy editor of the Midcoast Villager, based in Camden Maine. I live in Lincolnville, the next town over. I came here in kind of an unusual way.
Right out of college, I moved to Washington, D.C. to work in journalism. I got an internship at the News Hour on PBS, and then that led to another internship, which led to a job, which led to another job, and I ended up covering politics in D.C. for 15 years, the last 10 of which were at NBC News, where I covered campaigns. So presidential campaigns, senate campaigns, house campaigns, all over the country. I think I went to 46 states on the job. I never made it to Hawaii, although I tried. It started with covering the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2014 and from then on, just mainly covering Democrats. But being in D.C., very much doing the D.C. thing — most of my friends were also political reporters or in the business of politics.
But I had always wanted to get out of D.C. eventually. The first conversation that my wife and I had when we met at a press conference on Capitol Hill — she’s also a reporter, she was at The Guardian and Huff Post, and she’s freelance now — was like, D.C. is cool, but it’d be fun to live in a small town, on a farm or something someday. It was kind of pipe dream-ish talking. But then we got together, moved in, got married, and what really happened was my mom, who has lived here in Maine for a long time, got sick in 2021. She had a stroke while she was in the middle of a divorce. I’m an only child raised by a single mother, so it was not even a question about who was going to help take care of her. We thought about bringing her to D.C., but she has a huge community of friends here in Maine. So I was going back and forth a bunch, and then it became clear that that wasn’t going to be enough.
We moved here about a year later in November of 2022. We were really lucky to find this little rental house. It’s an old one-room schoolhouse in the woods in Lincolnville, which is very charming. It’s not the most functional for a family with a big dog and a cat and a five year old, but it backs up onto endless woods and a stream and a field, and my daughter is like, semi-feral now, which I love. She just takes off into the woods barefoot. It’s my favorite thing. My mom is now in a nursing home in Rockland. We get to see her pretty regularly, and she now has a relationship with her granddaughter that she wouldn’t otherwise have.
In 2022, we were already working remotely because of Covid, and because I covered campaigns, and not Congress or the White House, it was easier for me to do that from anywhere. I kept the NBC job, and I did it for two years from here. I knew I wanted to eventually leave. I was on a contract that was going to end in December 2025. But then in summer 2024, I got coffee with the people who the [Midcoast Villager’s] owner had put in charge of revamping the newspaper. I was just curious, not at all with an eye towards a job, but I wanted to know what the local newspaper in my backyard is doing.
It was actually four papers then, but I was a subscriber to one, the Camden Herald. They laid out their vision, how they were going to roll the four papers together, and how they wanted to innovate — the cafe and live events and writer retreats. And I was like, “oh my god, this is amazing.” It was this incredible mix of people with big talent and ambition who understand how modern media work, but are very much local and care about this community deeply, and want to give it the best possible local news source that we can, and try to reinvent the model of local news in the process, which is obviously something that I care about. I think every journalist — I think every American – should care about it.
The Midcoast Villager publishes a print edition every week. Stories cover topics like local government, climate change, and village life in rural Knox and Waldo counties. (Photo courtesy of Alex Seitz-Wald)
I’ve had so many conversations with friends in D.C. or New York who are like, “Oh, it’s really terrible” about what’s going on with local news, but no one’s doing anything about it. So it seemed like an opportunity to do something real. In late October of last year, they reached out again, asking do you know anyone who’d be interested in being a digital editor? I sent a name or two, but then I just kept thinking about it and couldn’t help myself. I was like, what would I do in that role? I got really excited about the possibilities, because this place is so amazing. There’s so many good stories to tell, and there’s video and podcast potential and there’s so much that you could do. I was like, I think I’ve talked myself into taking this job. So I threw my hat in the ring. I started in February.
DY: I shared earlier that I also recently moved here. I grew up in New Hampshire, but New Hampshire is its own different place. In Maine, I’ve realized that, like many other rural communities, trust is earned, not given. Even though you have some ties to Maine, you weren’t born here. How do you navigate trust-building when you’re still kind of an outsider in this community?
ASW: It’s something I think about a lot, and that I did worry about, frankly, when I was taking this job. I love what you said about trust being earned. I think that’s right. So don’t pretend to be something you’re not. I will never be a Mainer, and I admire Mainers. I think being humble and then trying to be really curious and open-minded and listen and follow people’s leads, and not try to tell people what I think should be done, but just to hear them, and then to earn trust.
We had four newspapers that covered individual towns, and those got rolled together into one newspaper. I wish we lived in a world where we could support four independent newspapers. It’s easy to get bent out of shape when somebody from one of those towns is like, you don’t cover our town as much. You hear that, and you take what valuable information there is from that, and then you show up every day and hope that over time, you earn their trust. I look forward to earning their trust. We’ve seen that happen in the year that we’ve been doing this.
DY: Do you have any specific moments that have stuck with you?
ASW: There was one, two days ago that really stuck with me. In this small town called Freedom, there was a recall against a Select Board Member [Select Boards are a common form of government in New England]. She was very bent out of shape about the way we covered that race. Now it’s been a little bit of time, there’s another recall in that same town, and she just reached out saying, by the way, if you’re interested in having a new town columnist from Freedom, I’d love to raise my hand. So, somebody who had been a huge critic of ours is now saying, I would actually like to work with you guys and be a part of the Villager. So that felt good.
DY: Yeah. Maybe she sees what it is that you’re trying to do.
ASW: I hope so. Unfortunately, we are all lucky to have a newspaper in this day and age. Forty percent of papers have shut down in the past 20 years, and something like 73% of reporter positions have been eliminated. So I don’t take it personally, because it feels like more frustration with the state of the economy and the industry. I share that frustration. I think we all do, so we just hope that we can do what we can to serve everyone and be a valuable resource.
Also, I think it’s a natural role for a journalist to be a little bit of an outsider. There’s some benefit that can come from having a little bit of distance. It kind of comes with the territory.
DY: I’m curious about that tension. To add on to what you were saying about the decline of local news, there’s also been a decline in trust in journalists. So on the one hand, there’s having an appropriate distance to report objectively, but then on the other, there’s also having community trust. How do you deal with that?
ASW: Those things are in tension. But I think it’s a healthy tension. You just have to work through it, because we are very much members of this community. I think that’s our superpower compared to national folks. We’re here, our kids go to the same schools, we go to the same sports games, we shop at the same grocery stores. When there’s an ice storm and your power goes out, our power goes out. We have skin in the game.
We all want to be accessible. That’s why we have the cafe. I want people to come up to me in Hannaford [the supermarket] and yell at me about a headline they didn’t like. But at the same time, we have to maintain some level of distance. It’s journalism ethics. You’re serving the reader as a whole, not that specific reader, and you’re serving the truth. As long as you maintain that, I think you can and should be an active member of your community on the boards of local or nonprofits raising money for good causes. But don’t do it for political causes, and don’t spout off on Facebook about something stupid. If you can be a square dealer for anybody who comes to you, then I think that distance can be helpful in building trust.
DY: What do you think people want from local news in 2025 that, from your experience working for a national news organization, national news can’t provide?
ASW: The most obvious thing is covering stuff that is not going to get covered by anyone else. I don’t want to speak for local news everywhere, but in these two counties, we’ve done a lot of surveys, and one of the number one things that people say is just like town governments and things that are going on.
Certainly CNN or the New York Times is not going to cover the Rockland town council or city council meeting. If we don’t cover those things, literally no one will. I came from a world where I was one of 50 reporters, sometimes hundreds of reporters, at political events that were going to get covered. Like, there’s no danger of a Joe Biden speech flying under the radar.
Now, I go to events, or my colleagues go to things where we are the only reporters there, and if we don’t cover it, it will not get covered. And that means there also won’t be a historical record. We think about that a lot, because our predecessor papers go back to the 1800s, and it’s such a valuable resource that chronicles these communities. We’re creating that resource. I think we all agree there are too many reporters in New York and D.C. and not enough in the rest of the country. That gap is very visible. It was visible to me when I was in D.C., but it’s even more visible now. And then finally, I think people really love this place, and that’s probably true in a lot of places, but really true here, and people love seeing their community and the best parts of it reflected in the paper. It’s a place where it feels like around every driveway, there could be some amazing hidden thing – an artist doing really cool stuff, or some niche car manufacturer. These are actual stories. There’s so many hidden, little secret stories around here, and people love reading about that and seeing what they love about their community reflected in it. I feel like we’re champions of the community and sort of spokespeople for it to the outside world and to itself, while also having to maintain that critical distance. And there’s also bad things that happen here, and we cover all of those horrible things too, because that’s reality.
DY: Downstairs from the newsroom where we’re sitting is the Villager Cafe. Tell me about that and how it fits in.
ASW: I think it sets us apart from almost anyone else. It is right in that sweet spot of connecting and being active members of the community. Coffee shops, or restaurants, or third places as they’re called, are gathering spaces for the community, naturally. I didn’t even know this when the cafe launched in May, but historically, newspapers actually came out of pubs and coffee houses in the 1600s in London and Amsterdam, because before there were printing presses, that’s where you would go to find out what was going on. So then that’s where they started printing and distributing newspapers from. So there’s a very real historical record there.
It is just a cafe, and if plenty of people just come in for coffee or lunch, that’s great, but it’s also a place that can help us connect with the community, be visible in the community, and also is our community. We’ve opened it up for the community to use it. I’ve loved seeing people just understanding the assignment and running with it. We have these regular events, every Friday after the paper comes out on Thursday, we go over what’s in that edition of the paper. I thought that was going to be more of a programmed event, that we would be walking people through it. But it ends up being open discussion office hours. People ask, how do you choose a story? How does advertising work? I think it’s really important for trust, and I think we as reporters in general could do a better job of being transparent. We love transparency, right? But, we could be more transparent about ourselves and the process, so that people understand instead of jumping to nefarious conclusions about things. So I think we need to be as transparent as we expect the government to be. The cafe is a big part of that, and helps us to do that.
The Villager Cafe opened in May 2025, shortly after Seitz-Wald came onto the newsroom staff. It’s located on the main street in Camden and serves as a hub for community events. (Photo courtesy of Alex Seitz-Wald)
DY: Does it bring in revenue? It’s no secret that it’s really difficult to run a newspaper these days.
ASW: That is the theory. I don’t know if it’s working yet because it’s just not my part of things, but revenue diversification is a huge piece of it. It used to be ads and subscriptions, and ads have declined. People are subscribing, but we’re not just competing against the New York Times and national papers, we’re also competing against Netflix and Amazon Prime. Maybe people want to spend their 10 bucks a month watching, you know, the latest Peacock shows. So we want to be making a product that is viable and something that people want to buy.
The guy who owns the newspaper also owns this little hotel, an 18-room inn next door. We just had our first writing retreat that the inn hosted. The cafe provided a lot of the food. They used the newsroom spaces, and the proceeds benefited the paper and local news. It sold out in a week. It was a way bigger success than we even expected. We intentionally brought in a writer from away to attract clientele from away, so that we’re not just hitting up our same people and our same businesses. So trying to bring in money from away so that we can serve our local community better.
DY: I’m at the beginning of my career, and it kind of feels like kind of a risky thing sometimes that I’m pursuing journalism, given the statistics about the business model. That brings me to the future. Most people my age are getting their news on social media, and artificial intelligence (AI) is impacting Google search traffic to traditional news websites. What do you think about that? How do you feel about the future of local news?
ASW: I have two very opposite feelings. One is that it’s obviously bad. That’s not even a take. That’s just reality. Things have gotten so bad. I was just at this conference of local news with Press Forward in Salt Lake City, with these innovative local news outlets across the country, and I left feeling very inspired and optimistic about the future of local news. There’s all kinds of interesting things happening, and I don’t know if the future of local news will look like a newspaper. Ours will, but others might be an influencer or a Substacker or a podcaster. You go on any local Facebook group, and people want information about their community, so it’s on us to figure out how to do that in a way that is financially sustainable. We haven’t figured that out yet, but I do feel like we’re getting there.
Then on the AI piece, that’s a really interesting one. There’s potential upsides. There’s this local startup that takes live streams of Select Board meetings and condenses them into a readable summary. Something like that has huge potential, not to replace reporters, but to make reporters jobs’ easier so they can cover more stuff and spend more time doing the stuff that AI can never do, which is making phone calls and going out and talking to people. AI can never see when the Select Board members whisper to each other in between, and they can never go up after the meeting, and say, hey, what were you guys whispering about?
And then on traffic, at least for us, we don’t really care about web traffic. We care about subscriptions. We sell ads only to local businesses. We don’t do any programmatic advertising or the kind of advertising where you looked at a coat on Amazon and now it’s following you around the web. We don’t do any of that. We want local people reading the paper and subscribing to it.
The final thing is that the future of local news has to be local. I totally respect these attempts to scale up a bunch of newsrooms across the country really quickly. I hope it works. I hope everything works. But we are trying to do something that is very specific to this place, and what will work here will not work in other communities, and vice versa. So I think it’s going to be like 1,000 flowers blooming instead of one secret weapon that solves everything.
DY: The vibe that I get from you is that you really believe in what you’re doing. But there’s got to be something that keeps you up at night. What are you worried about?
ASW: A lot of things. I’ve now gone on the record saying I took a 50% pay cut to do this job because I care about it, and I felt like I was at a point in my career where I can take one for me, you know. Our owner is amazing and cares deeply and personally about print newspaper. He loves a print newspaper. So I’m not worried about that, per se. I think we’re doing a lot of the right things. We’re making a million mistakes too. We’ve gotten very nice attention. We’ve built it. Will they come? So that’s the big thing. Only time will tell, because our subscriptions are up, our news stand sales are up, our web traffic is up. Our Instagram account has tripled in size. Everything is moving in the right direction, but we’re still not profitable. I don’t know that we’re even close to it yet. So do those trend lines continue, or do they cap out? Can a local community support a modern, full spectrum newsroom? That’s still an open question.
DY: You’re coming up on a year in this job. Is it what you thought it would be?
ASW: Yes, and so much more. I’ve been working harder in this job than I have in years. I’ve always just been a reporter. I’ve cared about media and larger things and followed it and read about it and been an armchair pundit on it. But now I have to put my money where my mouth is, and so I’m learning about tech platforms that I never had to learn about, and the business side and financial sides, which I never had to learn about.
I’ve never been an editor managing people. Each one of those is a big thing on its own, and I was thrown all of it, and it was really challenging. The first six months especially, were really challenging. Sometimes I was like, what the hell did I do? Not because I didn’t care or believe in it, but like, am I up to this challenge? But you know, you build muscle by working out. Working out is no fun. You’re literally tearing your muscles so they regrow stronger. And that’s like learning professionally.
I also think collectively here, we know how to do the journalism. The challenge is on the business side and making it work. I thought I would be very focused on the journalism side. But almost immediately, I was like, oh, well, that’s actually okay. Where we really need to improve is on the business side. We haven’t figured out how to make it work financially. So, I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about that than I expected.
DY: Interesting.
ASW: This is maybe unpopular, but I think that as journalists, we have to think about this stuff. Those days when you could just say, that’s not my department, are kind of over. You don’t have to be selling ads or anything, but just to understand, how does this place I work actually function? What’s the business model? I think that’s useful.
DY: I’m at the end of my question list here. What did I miss?
ASW: I don’t know if it’s too on the nose, but the urban and rural here in Maine. The daily realities of rural life, I feel like, are just not understood by people in the city and vice versa. I was joking to somebody that people go on student exchanges, that there should be an exchange program to go work on a dairy farm or in the timber industry. Because it’s so cool, and there’s so many fun, amazing things to do. And it’s also hard. Heating your house is a real thing, and people die because they can’t afford to heat their homes, or they can’t get to rural health care. And also, maybe this is a Maine thing, but when you have neighbors who probably have different points of view or vote differently, but you talk about, you know, the pears from their tree. Literally our neighbor just brought a bag of pears over and talked about the bear he saw the other day. You can just connect on things that are harder to connect to when it’s politics first. We’ve just become so sorted into these big identity clusters, or we don’t really interact with people, and we just need other ways to talk to people. I feel like that’s just easier in a rural place. You just have to rely on each other, or hate each other, but at least you have some kind of interaction.
DY: It’s up close and personal in a way it is not as much in urban areas.
ASW: Right. If you see somebody on the metro in D.C., you never see them again. But here, people look out for each other, even if they’re grumbling about it, they’ll help you out.
DY: That’s true. Well, thank you. This has been a fun conversation.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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