The News
One of NBC’s top political reporters is leaving to help lead a startup in Maine that’s trying out a new local news business model.
Alex Seitz-Wald, the network’s primary reporter on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and Joe Biden’s in 2020, told Semafor he is leaving to help the build the Midcoast Villager, a newly-launched roll-up of four legacy newspapers in Maine.
The organization has ambitious goals to create a new model for local journalism embedded in the community, with help from owner Reade Brower. The publication will work alongside a small book publisher, and will run events and writers retreats out of a hotel and adjacent Villager Cafe, a coffee shop that will operate in conjunction with the newspaper, whose offices sit above the cafe.
The Midcoast Villager will also be the first client of Civic Sunlight, a Maine-based AI startup founded by the former CTO of the Atlantic and a former executive at Fox. The company plans to partner with media companies by using AI to transcribe and summarize local meetings and analyze them for trends.
“It’s this really rare opportunity to have not just the newspaper, but this whole collection of assets that can be totally reinvented and repurposed,” he told Semafor.
For a state of its size, Maine has developed an unusually strong and unique local media landscape, where partisans have battled for influence. As Semafor previously reported, the National Trust for Local News, which bought up many Maine newspapers previously owned by Brower, has worked to prop up Maine’s local media ecosystem largely by helping smaller, traditional newsrooms. On the right, conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo funded a digital outlet in Maine.