In a long and storied journalism career, mostly at the Concord Monitor and its sister paper the Valley News, Mark Travis occupied just about every position available in local newspapers, from freelance writer to publisher. But it wasn’t those titles he recited when good friend Stephen Blackmer asked him to say who he really was.

“I still recall Mark’s answers: ‘I am a storyteller. As a storyteller, I write. Journalism pays the bills,’ ” Blackmer wrote in an online memorial to Travis, who died last Sunday following a rapidly progressive infection.

That role stayed with Travis even after he retired, as can be attested by many people in Canterbury, N.H., where Mark and wife, Brenda, lived for most of four decades, raising two children, Ben and Leanna. Among the many who appreciated Travis is David Balshaw, owner of the Canterbury Country Store.

“Mark was a frequent user of the room that we call the feedlot. He was often meeting and counseling with a lot of young writers and journalists, offering advice. He used it as a meeting room to help others along their path,” Balshaw said. “I always found Mark as a person who was always curious, always interested in what people thought, what they had to say. He was one of those people who truly was a lifelong learner, a lifelong giver. He will be sorely missed.”

Travis, who was born in Dover, N.H., in 1957 and raised in Andover, Mass., started working as a part-time reporter for the Monitor covering Pittsfield, N.H., after he graduated from Brown University. He became a reporter and editor at the Valley News before moving south to spend two years as a reporter and then bureau chief at the St. Petersburg Times in Florida.

In 1986 he and Brenda moved back north and settled in Canterbury. Over the next 28 years, Travis filled a variety of roles at Newspapers of New England, the Monitor’s parent company, including stints as publisher of the Monitor, the Valley News and what was then the Monadnock Ledger. In 2002, he was awarded a journalism fellowship with the Nieman Foundation, and the family moved to Cambridge, Mass., were he spent an academic year at Harvard.

At the Monitor, Travis connected with Mike Pride, the paper’s esteemed editor who led the newsroom as it won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 2008 for its series, “Remember Me,” that followed Carolynne St. Pierre, a Concord maternity nurse and mother of three who was diagnosed with a fatal form of cancer.

The two men co-wrote “My Brave Boys,” a history of the Fifth New Hampshire Volunteers in the Civil War. Later on, Travis wrote “Pliney Fisk,” a mystery set around Concord after the Civil War, and “In Union: A History of Canterbury Shaker Village.”

Travis’ tenures as publisher and editor covered the painful transition for local papers as the online world undermined its advertising-based business model. Much of his work involved finding new ways for local journalism to thrive.

“What I remember the most about Mark was his ability to think a little differently about how we did local news,” said Meg Heckman, one of a number of prize-winning reporters hired by Travis and Pride. She is now an associate professor at Northeastern University.

She pointed to the creation of the Concord Insider, the Monitor’s weekly hyper-local publication, as an example.

“He was one of the leading voices in our efforts to find a digital future for the Monitor and help the paper find its voice online,” she said. “He recruited me for that. I liked covering City Hall, but Mark saw something in me and started recruiting me into digital strategy sessions. Next thing I knew I was doing community engagement and teaching myself computer code, eventually the Monitor’s web editor.”

As part of that role, Heckman and Travis traveled to Newspapers of New England’s half-dozen papers in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, preaching the then-new idea of gathering audience through search engine optimization or SEO.

“Somebody called us The SEOSpeedwagon,” a pun on the name of the rock band that came to fame in the 80s. “We got very into it; we had memos titled with it,” she recalled.

In 2014, the push for new journalism models led Travis to leave the Monitor and help launch DailyUV, an online platform for user-generated news focused on the Upper Valley. That effort, eventually renamed HereCast, folded in 2019.

After that, Travis moved to the last role of his career as a ghostwriter. At Scribe Media, he ghost-wrote nine books, including a wide-circulation account of the experiences of a Google marketing executive.

In Canterbury, Travis was a member of the Town History Book Committee, edited the town newsletter, and performed as a town founding father come to life during the town’s October cemetery walk.

Travis was diagnosed with leukemia years ago, undergoing chemotherapy and ultimately a bone marrow transplant. He died early Saturday, Nov. 2, at Massachusetts General Hospital.

A memorial service will take place Friday, Nov. 22 at 10 a.m. at Canterbury United Community Church. Calling hours will take place between 2;30-4:30 p.m. and 5:30-7:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 21 at the Canterbury Parish Hall, 6 Hackleboro Road.

Donations can be made to the renovation project for the Canterbury Community Parish House. Checks should be made out to the CUCC with the memo line: IMO Mark Travis Parish House CC Renovations.