The announcement came late last month. Mr. Paperback, the popular bookstore chain that has been a fixture in Maine for 50 years, would go out of business at the end of April because of a shaky economy and technological advances that have changed the public’s reading habits and siphoned off customers.
“Business is not great. It seemed like a good time to get out,” said Mr. Paperback’s general manager, Jim McCree. “Most of us know that the book business and anything in print is not a particularly healthy place to be.” The decision came less than a year after national book chain Borders closed 399 stores, including several in Maine.
Then, just two weeks later, another shocker involving the print media: For the same basic reasons the bookstores were going out of business, the owner of four Maine weekly newspapers in the midcoast area announced that the papers had ceased publication.
“The media industry is struggling worldwide. The entire industry is trying to figure out how to sustain professional journalism,” said Richard Anderson, founder of Village NetMedia which owns the papers — the Village Soup Gazette in Rockland, Village Soup Journal in Belfast, the Bar Harbor Times and the Capital Weekly in Augusta — as well as the online villagesoup.com, which also shut down.
Anderson started his online operation in 1997 and expanded to open two newspapers — the Knox County Times in Rockland in 2003 and Waldo County Citizen in Belfast in 2004. He closed those papers upon acquiring Rockland’s Courier-Gazette, the Camden Herald, the Bar Harbor Times and the Capital Weekly in 2008, the same year he purchased and closed the Waldo Independent of Belfast.
The Republican Journal of Belfast, predecessor to the Village Soup Journal, was founded in 1829 and was the grand old lady of the lot. The Courier-Gazette dated to 1846, the Camden Herald to 1870 and the Bar Harbor Times to 1914.
As might be expected, the demise of newspapers of such long service to the midcoast area has been Topic A in many a conversation in the region since Anderson’s startling announcement. By midweek there was hope that several of the papers might soon be resurrected by Reade Brower, owner of The Free Press, a weekly newspaper founded in 1985 to serve Knox, Waldo and Lincoln counties. Brower reportedly had signed a letter of intent to purchase assets of Village NetMedia.
And so the casualties in the print media mount, each loss of publication lamented by older readers even as younger ones — weaned on the whiz-bang gadgetry of the rapidly evolving electronic information age — purposefully shun the joys of discovery possible in traditional books and newspapers.
While on my daily walk recently, I was stopped by a couple of longtime friends for a chat at the side of the road. When the conversation turned to the Mr. Paperback closing and the popularity of online books and blogs and such, we agreed that cozying up to an impersonal computerized version of a book or newspaper hardly compares to the comforts of spending time with the real thing.
“That’s because we’re old-school,” the better half of the couple remarked, and I suppose that’s true. But in our old-school obstinacy we have some pretty high-octane company.
“I cannot live without books,” former President Thomas Jefferson disclosed in a letter to former President John Adams in June of 1815.
Were he around today in our time of infatuation with all things digital, Jefferson might explain that he was talking about real books, printed on paper. The kind of book you can hold in your hands, misjudge by its cover, lend to a friend with no hope of ever getting it back, place a bookmark between the pages of, spill coffee on, fall asleep over or use as a doorstop and it still will remain a loyal friend.
Somewhat earlier Jefferson had famously written that he wouldn’t much care to live in a world without newspapers, either. In a letter to Col. Edward Carrington in 1787, he wrote:
“The basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
A founding father’s strong words hint at the difficulties that might lie in store for the country should too many of its newspapers one day cease to publish.
BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. His email address is maineolddawg@gmail.com.
I’m of the younger generation but don’t own a kindle, ipad, ect. While I do read the newspaper online it’s mostly so I can read the comments sections when I’m finished with the articles. I do hope however, that 50 years from now when I’m in my rocking chair I’ll be able to reach beside me and pick up a real, paper paged book.
May I suggest you take time to consider and research what you have read, contemplate, and then, and only then, read the comments.
Pointaway, you make a very good point and honestly one of the reasons I like to read the comments is so if someone makes a point I’m not aware of I can look it up and verify for myself. I do the same with many articles that I read. While I still do pick up the paper (it’s nice that my parents still have one lying around when I visit) it’s also nice to be able to look up information quickly if so desired. As for books though, I still like the feel of a real book and it doesn’t hurt my eyes to sit and read for many hours. I can’t see that changing. I sincerely hope that print media stays around for a few generations longer.
I think that we’ll be sorry in 20+ years when there will be fewer tangible forms of media and companies have us locked into buying everything electronically. When most everything is electronic, will we still be able to loan books? Sure, we can do it today in some formats, but there’s really no incentive for them to and there’ll be fewer incentives when they control all publishing.
On another note, what the younger people may not realize or even care about right now is that holding the book your father or mother read when they were younger adds so much more depth to the experience than reading colored pixels on a cold and sterile screen.
I have a yellowing scrapbook of newspaper articles that I occasionally pick up and scan. My stories of interest have to do with the way this State (and others where I have lived) treat un-familied children. Newspapers had much to do with changing the lot of these youngsters.
Papers like the Bangor Daily, Maine Times, Portland Press Herald, and the Portland Evening Gazette opened the doors to the stinking pit which was Pineland, and the abuses at the old Maine Youth Center. Several private agencies closed after newspapers exposed the Sex abuse by Kenny Walker (former Sheriff) at an Ellsworth Falls “shelter”, the hiring practices of an Owl’s Head facility which had convicted felons working with children, and the Physical and emotional abuse of clients at Elan.
My area of interest is just one place where investigative reporting is an absolute necessity. Historically all other news outlets (including the internet) have gotten the meat and potatoes of the stories they move from the investigative reporting at the Nation’s newspapers.
Unfortunately small to medium size papers like those in Maine have had to cut their staffs, fire reporters, and hire…. well, to be kind, non-reporters.
This paper, The Bangor Daily is no longer relevant. Even older loyal readers of newspapers (like myself) can’t get into reading endless opinion, or the he said she said information which has replaced true reporting.
So there is blame to go around. My only question is who is watching the disadvantaged children, the workers who are being abused by their employers, and the crooked politicians?
I’d also would rather have newspapers without government than government without newspapers.
I prefer a hands on book do not own a Kindle, etc. Those who do read much via the computer screen and other tech devices must be sure to look into extra vitamins needed to protect their eyes.
Wonder if the Bible will go out of print also.
God Forbid!
Young people are not “purposefully”, or otherwise, shunning the books. Not many of us, when young, read anything in the newspapers but the comic strips. Reading the newspapers was often assigned reading in high school – at least in my time. Saying that about young people equates with saying that older people are incapable of, and unwiling to utilize electronic equipment and the internet. If enough people pronounce a thing dead, it is almost impossible to raise it. Let’s stop saying this sort of thing.
I never once entered a “Mr. Paperback,” I’m a hard-cover, non-fiction sort anyway.
What there won’t be, unless people begin picking up reference books, academic books, non-fiction and fiction, poetry, biography, no matter how outdated, are the original source materials. There’s a fellow in lower Maine who holds copies, fully copies of newspapers, because he knows they are important.
The first few printings of F. Scott Fitzgeralds’ “This Side of Paradise,” was it? had numerous typographical errors, yet even those errors became a matter for discussion, dispute, and learning. The book was a success. Printed on paper. Bound.
What we will read, what we learn, cannot only be dictated by search engines. The type of discovery found in library card catalogues is also no longer available. Frightening, really, when you do a search for a word like “memory.” It’s a matter of ram, but it’s not a sheep. History, whether current or past, is often cleaned up. There are words that upset us when we read them now. “How could they have thought that? Said that?
We need to save remaining books and newspapers so that they do not become extinct. So we have records of how people thought and behaved, unabridged. I trust that younger people know this, too.
The higher costs of my daily BDN & the price of paperbacks led me to embrace my Kindle. Once I learned to prop it up on a table top easel for meal time readings, I never looked back. I catch the news online & TV. Yes, I miss reading a daily paper. But papers are getting slimmer all the time. It’s probably best that I wean myself off them before they disappear from sight. If I must give up something, better to do it on my own terms.
Mr. Ward is right – there has been a lot of conversation about the demise of local newspapers. But, it didn’t start with Mr. Anderson’s annoucement last week, it started shortly after Mr. Anderson bought these papers. That is when they started the slow and long demise.
It is too bad that Mr. Anderson didn’t think like Thomas Jefferson, that newspapers that inform citizens about local issues are important to good governance. The first thing he did was fire David Grima, a terrific – and courageous – local editor. Besides being an excellent writer, Mr. Grima wasn’t afraid to take on hot local issues and he wasn’t afraid to come down on one side or another. Mr. Anderson gave up reporting anything controversial and turned our fine local papers into Chamber of Commerce mouthpieces. We’ve been missing good papers for a long time, and I, for one, and very excited that Reade Brower will be heading up the comeback; the Free Press is not your run-of-the-mill paper because Mr. Brower is not your run-of-the-mill newspaper owner. I think we’ll be in good hands, and with some new energy hopefully we’ll be reading our papers for a long time to come.
I wish Mr. Brower all the luck — I hope the first thing he does is to hire Mr. Grima back as Editor!