Newspaper Survival in the Digital Age

Newspapers are dinosaurs.

Those of us who were brought up on print still love our newspapers. We will probably continue reading them in varying degrees until the day we die. Indeed, it’s been said that the best hope for the newspaper industry is Americans over 50.

Which means the industry in its present form has got maybe another 30 years before it’s the stuff of legend.

We’ll remember newspapers in print the same way we pine for the fresh milk that used to be delivered to our family's doorstep every winter morning. We’ll recall the scrunch of a morning paper being read at the breakfast table as we do the sound of eggs frying and the smell of Pop Tarts fresh from the toaster.

But none of the kids born today will grow up to say that their first job was having a newspaper route.

With the possible exception of a couple national dailies and a scattering of excellent local papers such as this one, print versions of newspapers will by mid-century be like old leather bellows. Cracked and creaky, good conversation pieces, and excellent for starting fires.

Anyone who thinks otherwise obviously does not have an iPad.

I will spare you a litany of the many wonderful things about the leading tablet computer. Let’s just say the iPad represents the kind of transformation that occurred when television went from three channels in black and white, to 50 channels in color.

Like cable TV, the iPad makes available lots of new, highly disposable junk. But it also opens up a bright and engrossing new world of knowledge and entertainment.

Already the possibilities of the tablet form -- the ability to go well beyond the inherent restrictions of print -- are being realized by pioneers such as Al Gore. He has authored/compiled/directed “Our Choice” for the iPad. This multimedia sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth" is a deeply involving documentary/book/movie. Call it a “docubookie” or “boovietary.”

The iPad also delivers a pretty satisfying version of newspapers. For example, it pulls in the New York Times at one-third the price of the print version, with the convenience of home delivery you can't get in
Addison County for the print version.

The online Times (about $20 a month for iPad access) affords access to an array of video, blogs, way more photos than can make it into print, mashups of sound and data visualizations about radio programs, and ingeniously interactive maps.

It’s enough to make this old newspaper guy wish he could sit down at a computer with a case of Red Bull and write code for the next 48 hours.

Even before the availability of the iPad, many of us had been reading newspapers on our computers for more than a decade. We’ve been guiltily guzzling the news for free from the websites of the Burlington Free Press, Rutland Herald or the New York Times, when we used to pay 75 cents or more a day to read them in print form.

The result for some newspapers has been an explosion in readership – the Times has never been so influential or so widely read – and a frightening decline in paid subscriptions and the ad revenues tied to print.

Many historians and PhD candidates will spend the next few decades debating where newspapers went wrong in the digital age.

Newspaper companies felt they had no choice but to offer their content for free online, in a race for "eyeballs" that would supposedly bring with them a fresh, mountainously large source of ad revenue. But it turns out to be impossible to charge the same amount for advertising online as for print ads. And online, newspapers are seem by many Internet users as just one of a gazillion choices.

The Wall Street Journal has for years been successfully charging its readers for online content. Recently the Times put up a "paywall" that sharply limits how many articles readers can see for free online. The failure or success of this strategy will likely determine the paper's fate, and perhaps that of newspapers as a medium.

In the meantime, regional daily papers such as the Burlington Free Press and Rutland Herald face an uncertain fate. In Vermont and everywhere else, readers increasingly turn to other sources for news and entertainment, and longtime subscribers are getting older.

Cities such as Detroit now lack a daily paper, and once great papers such as the Los Angeles Times are sad shadows of their former selves.

The happy exceptions to this startling decline, I hasten to add, are some weekly and twice-weekly papers.

That’s partly due to the lack of digital alternatives. If you want to know what’s going on in the world, you can get your news from print, broadcast media, and online sources. If you want to know what's going on in Addison County, you simply need to read the Addison Independent.

It's true that it is possible to read that newspaper online, if you pay just a little extra. The paper has, quite wisely I think, decided not to give away its content online for free. But except among snowbirds who keep track of Addison County news from their winter perches in Florida, the overwhelming majority of readers get the local paper in print form.

Vermonters have a knack for embracing the best of things new and old. In the former category is Gov. Peter Shumlin’s initiative to bring high-speed Internet service to every Vermont household. We hold on to the old pleasures of print because it still fit this state's identity. Even in the age of the iPad, the Independent and other Vermont newspapers like it remain a deeply embedded part of the regional culture.

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Getting Real about Vermont Real Estate

We began the Great Real Estate Adventure-Dilemma (GREAD) back in February.

For me, our new home would be the sixth place I've occupied in the past seven years. African herdsman move less often than I do.

Like all naïvely optimistic would-be homeowners, we were sure that we would find several great places to choose from.

The three of us, eighth-grader included, were doing everything right. We’d done our Internet research and made our list of “must-have” and “no-way-Jose” features. We had a real-estate agent who was both a friend and a highly capable professional.

We were starting out early in the buying season. Surely we would get first look at all the hot new properties.

Or so we thought. Turns out that most of the properties on the market were neither hot nor new. Some of them had been sitting out there for more than a year, growing more frigid by the day.

OK, then. Primed by historically low interest rates and an allegedly depressed housing market, we figured there were bargains to be had.

Then we looked a little harder, and gulped.

If there were real estate bargains close to Middlebury, they were well hidden. Or just perfect for people less picky than we were.

Most of the new and ready-to-be-built homes seemed to be at 2006 prices: As if there had been no Great Recession, no collapse in prices, no disaster that turned collateralized debt obligations into horse manure.

As for older homes on the market, their sellers also appeared to believe we were still living in Boom City. Everyone was waiting for that rich New Yorker to show up with an open checkbook.

Prices were so unrealistically high that I came to think people didn't really want to sell their homes. They just wanted to list them.

I guess everyone thinks her home is the special one, the one gem that will generate demand from multiple buyers.

Probably these people also think they will win the Vermont lottery and immediately retire.

It's anybody's guess what things are actually worth these days. Listing prices are so high as to seem concocted over cocktails, so ridiculously out of whack as to invite hilariously lowball offers.

As in any real estate market, certain Addison County towns are perceived to have more cachet than others. Would-be sellers in Cornwall, for example, seem to feel their address automatically adds $150,000 to the price of the place.

We are all, in the words of the Paul Simon song, mistaking value for the price.

Our real estate search became an obsession. This winter when we weren’t sleeping, working or snowboarding, we were tracking new listings on line, talking to our Realtor, and out looking at houses.

Old houses. New houses. Model homes. 19th-century farmhouses. Places you could drive a truck through -- located on a highway where it sounded like someone actually was driving a truck through them at that very moment.

Planned residential developments. Haphazardly located country homes. Single-story ranch houses with sunken living rooms. Ultra-modern, architect-designed mini-palaces. Everything but mobile homes and hotels.

We became experts on local real estate websites. I can readily tell you who has the best blog; the finest photos; and the most profusely misleading property descriptions.

Comparing the online photos to the actual house interiors reminded me of what happens on web dating services. The hard-body gym rat turns out to be 50 pounds overweight. The charming, well lit dining room is in fact darker than Plato's cave.

But it wouldn't be fair to put all the blame on unrealistic sellers. We were certainly unrealistic buyers, too.

We dreamed of finding the underpriced place that with TLC and an extra $100,000 could become a showplace. But all those houses have already been turned into showplaces.

We were sure there was raw land with Adirondack views but without huge costs for septic, road, well, and utilities. We were going to be, alone among all would-be buyers in Vermont, the only ones to figure out how to build a Yankee Magazine prizewinner for $120 a square foot.

And then there were our contrasting tastes. I thought a nicely styled ranch house would be perfect for aging in place. She, on the other hand, dreamed of the real estate equivalent of the neutron bomb -- one that would spare the occupants but destroy all ranch houses now in existence.

I wanted to live 60 seconds from the co-op. She seemed ready to move to Port Henry for the right house.

So what did we learn about the state of the local real estate market?

Even though demand for new homes is way down, builders are (unrealistically, in my view) still quoting $200 a square foot for new construction. That means a 1,500-square-foot house costs $300,000 to build. Typical costs for getting a driveway, utilities and water to the site add another $100,000-plus – meaning even a glorified ranch house is going to run at least $400,000 and likely more.

While it’s possible to get an older house for less, buyers who can afford to be a bit discriminating will typically need to pay $350,000 and up if they want to live anywhere near Middlebury, in something that’s not tiny or a tract home.

After three months of looking, we decided that despite our real estate agent's admirable efforts, the right place wasn't out there -- at least not in a price we could afford without signing away the eighth-grader into a lifetime of indentured servitude.

We'll be moving into our new rental house in early June.

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