The Midcoast Villager cut six staff members, including its managing editor, in a round of layoffs and buyouts last month.
Publisher Aaron Britt said it was “purely a financial and business decision.”
“Like a lot of newspapers, we are on a path to sustainability,” he said. “We had to do a bit of restructuring to ensure that we get there.”
Three staff members took buyouts and three were laid off. In addition to managing editor Christine Simmonds, two copy editors left or were laid off, along with three staffers from the sales and advertising department.
Simmonds has been hired as an associate editor at the Lincoln County News, a locally owned weekly paper based in Newcastle. She declined to comment on her departure from the Villager but confirmed Britt’s version of events and said she loved working at the Villager and is glad to be continuing her work in local news.
When the Midcoast Villager launched in September 2024, it merged four local newspapers, all owned by Reade Brower. Brower also owned the Portland Press Herald along with four other daily newspapers and 17 weeklies until he sold them to a nonprofit news organization in 2023 for $15 million, as reported by the Boston Globe.
The Villager, which is based in Camden and covers Knox and Waldo counties, did not cut staff after the merger. “We needed everybody to figure out how to make a really good newspaper that serves the community,” Britt said.
As time went on, the paper has made some hires in sales and marketing. But it also had to “get a little leaner” Britt said.
Britt said the paper expects to be profitable next year. It is beating the circulation and advertising revenue of the four previous papers combined and may break even this year, he said.
The paper now has a staff of 29 people and shares a finance and HR department with Brower’s other businesses, said Britt. Even with the recent staff departures, the Villager has four more full-time employees than it did when the four papers merged in 2024, he said.
Since its founding, the Midcoast Villager has drawn national media attention. The New York Times, CBS News and other outlets have zeroed in on the paper’s staff — many of whom have a big-city pedigree — and its business model that includes a visually rich print weekly broadsheet and cafe that subsidizes the paper and serves as an event space.
The regional paper has also faced criticism from some locals who say it can’t provide the kind of local coverage its predecessors did.
The Midcoast Villager and the Bangor Daily News have a content sharing agreement that allows the organizations to publish each other’s articles, though they otherwise operate independently.
Britt says there are no more staff cuts on the horizon.