The New York Times discovers Maine’s Midcoast Villager. Here’s the rest of the story.

The Midcoast Villager, an innovative weekly newspaper based in Camden, Maine, got The New York Times treatment last week. But though the Times lavished attention on the high-profile journalists who’ve been recruited to work there as well as the café it’s opened to extend public outreach, it missed entirely the Villager’s long history as a tech innovator — a history that extends all the way to the present.

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The Times article and visuals, by Steven Kurutz and Cig Harvey, are certainly entertaining enough, starting with their portrayal of deputy editor Alex Seitz-Wald, who left a job covering Washington for NBC News to come to Maine. “I did an insane thing,” he tells the Times. “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.”

And Seitz-Wald is far from the only high-profile journalist who packed up and relocated Down East, a phenomenon to which the Times brings the requisite degree of skepticism. Kurutz writes:

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.” [The Camden Herald was one of the Villager’s four predecessor papers.]

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.”

But what you won’t read in the Times’ story is that, several times removed, the Villager began life as one of the very first online-only hyperlocal news outlets. Known as VillageSoup, it was begun in Camden by an entrepreneur named Richard Anderson way back in 1996.

As described by three UMass Amherst researchers in 2010, VillageSoup became an economically successful model for sustainable local journalism by adding print weeklies in order to bolster advertising. “Today, Anderson has a sustainable multimedia enterprise, and a business model that could serve as the savior for weekly newspapers in communities with a population around 30,000,” the researchers, Norman Sims, Bill Densmore and Sara Majka, wrote in the Online Journal of Research & Policy. “VillageSoup may be the first genuine example of alternative news media reaching sustainability.”

Two years later, though, Anderson announced he would shut down the website, his four weekly papers and an entertainment publication, citing “profound changes in the newspaper publishing business,” according to Stephen Betts of the Bangor Daily News (sub. req.).

That’s when Reade Brower — a key figure in the Maine newspaper business — swooped in. He already owned a weekly called The Free Press and a printing business, and within days he said he would purchase VillageSoup’s assets. “I felt a responsibility to the community to be part of the solution,” Brower told Betts (sub. req.). “These papers are the papers of record. Someone needed to step up.”

Brower later parlayed that move into a much bigger one, purchasing the Portland Press Herald and its family of daily and weekly newspapers in 2015. He was getting his feet wet just as I was reporting in Portland on Boston-area entrepreneur Aaron Kushner’s failed effort to buy those papers. Kushner had earlier fallen short in his quest to buy The Boston Globe, but he and a group he put together later succeeded in purchasing the Orange County Register, in Southern California. I reported on his profligate mismanagment of the Register in my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls.” After Kushner had run the paper into the ground, it was acquired by Alden Global Capital, which today operates it on a shoestring.

Brower, meanwhile, proved to be a decent steward of the Press Herald. But profitability was hard to come by, and he imposed several rounds of cuts during his time at the helm, finally selling it to a would-be savior — the nonprofit National Trust for Local News — in 2023. Sadly, the National Trust, whose goal was to purchase and operate papers that might otherwise close or fall into the hands of corporate chains, has had plenty of problems of its own, selling off many of its suburban papers near Denver and imposing severe cuts at its Maine papers.

After exiting Portland, Brower retreated to the weeklies he’d acquired in the Camden area. He and his business partner, Kathleen Fluery Capetta, decided to combine their four papers into one, which usually means cuts will soon follow. Instead, they regarded the consolidation as an opportunity to build up their paper.

Perhaps the most interesting move they’ve made, other than opening a café, is partnering with a local AI company known as Civic Sunlight to extend their small staff’s reach. What would not be interesting, of course, would be using AI to write stories based on transcripts of government meetings. Instead, the Villager is taking those transcripts and putting them in the hands of their reporters for follow-up. It’s a way of extending the Villager’s reach in the 40-plus towns that it covers, something that would otherwise be far beyond the capacity of the Villager’s small staff. As Mark Caro wrote for Medill’s Local News Initiative earlier this year:

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.”

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.”

My What Works partner Ellen Clegg and I have long been interested in new models for for-profit local journalism, which are much-needed given the difficulty of finding philanthropic nonprofit dollars in every community that needs reliable news.

Which is another reason that the Midcoast Villager provides some reason for hope, even though it’s more hybrid than purely for-profit. It’s sustained by advertising and a paywall — although you can also make a tax-exempt donation to its nonprofit arm. In that respect, its business model is similar to that of The Provincetown Independent. The Villager is also the recipient of a two-year, $200,000 grant from Press Forward, the major philanthropy funding local news.

Twenty-nine years after VillageSoup popped into existence as one of the first technological solutions to the then-nascent local news crisis, its progeny is continuing to innovate its way into an uncertain but hopeful future. It’s too bad that the Times missed that part of the story.