Sarah Longwell and Alex Seitz-Wald: The Maine Thing

**Sarah Longwell** (0:12)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Bulwark Podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, sitting in for Tim Miller once again. Guy never works. We've got a great Thursday show for you.
And just as a reminder, there's no show tomorrow. So to bring you into this podcast long weekend, we're going to do what everyone loves to do in the summertime. We're going to go to Maine.
Our Sherpa for Maine is Alex Seitz-Wald, formerly of NBC News, now the Deputy Editor of the Midcoast Villager, a local newspaper in Camden, Maine, a guy I have been glued to through all of the Maine issues over the last few months. Thank you for joining us, Alex, from what looks like a cabin in Maine.

**Alex Seitz-Wald** (0:55)
Hey, Sarah. Thanks so much for having me. This is indeed my cabin office, a shed of one's own, where I can escape the family to work.

**Sarah Longwell** (1:03)
A shed of one's own. I like that. I'm super excited that you're here, because for all of the attention that Maine has gotten, suddenly the eye of Sauron has moved on. Everybody's looking at Michigan now. That's the new hot race. But I'm dying to talk about as the race resets and Troy Jackson gets in, what we think Maine's going to look like. But before we do that, the other reason I really wanted to have you on is, I am a big fan of people who build new things or who make choices in this new environment to try to get at the real stuff. So I've got mad respect for what you did, because you moved to Maine, I know, to care for your mom and you joined the villager last year. Everybody dreams about moving to a cabin in Maine.
Actually, I don't know if you know this, it's a popular dream among the lesbian community.
There are many skits about lesbians where everybody's just like, I want to open a coffee shop in Maine. But you really did it. The thing that everybody always says they wants to do but never do, you left DC, the whole rat race, started at a local media company. Why'd you do that and what's it been like?

**Alex Seitz-Wald** (2:12)
It's been very different and wonderful.
So as you said, I was 10 years at NBC News, 15 in DC, lived there since college, met my wife there at a press conference on Capitol Hill, also a recovering political journalist. My mom got sick in 2021, I was going back and forth, it was COVID, so I was working from home anyway. We decided to move up thinking it would be maybe temporary, but just loved it, loved the community, loved the pace of life and how real it felt being outside of the Beltway. Then this local paper started up and I have our new issue, which is a political leaf focus, and we're quite proud of this headline, I have to say.

**Sarah Longwell** (2:52)
I laughed out loud.

**Alex Seitz-Wald** (2:54)
A little fun is always good, but the place that can do a fun headline with a beautiful photograph, it's elevated, it's smart, it has a sense of humor, and it's personal in a way that covering national politics can't be. I would go around the country and be one of 50 reporters, 100 reporters at a political event, trying to write some slightly different take from the guy next to me, and here, I go and cover something, and I'm the only reporter there.
If I don't report on it or if my colleagues don't report on it, there's no record of it, the community doesn't know about it. We hear about things, we're accountable, where when the power goes out, it goes out for us, when the Internet goes out, it goes out for us. We have a cafe under our newsroom that's owned by the same guy, helps diversify revenue, and we also use it to connect with the community. So every Friday, I just post up in the cafe or one of my colleagues, and it's just kind of open office hours, anybody can come and pitch a story or complain about a headline, whatever. It's great, and it feels like the way journalism is meant to be practiced in its most fundamental level. And that used to be how every journalist started, would be at your local paper, and then maybe you would get to DC one day, but that pipeline has just been obliterated by the decline of local news, so I'm kind of going backwards in doing it. Took a 50 percent pay cut to do it, but I absolutely love it and highly recommend to any disaffected DC New York journalists out there, go to your home paper, go somewhere to a small town and work for the local paper.