Reinvention trumps loss in picturesque Maine town

BELFAST, Maine -It's hard to believe, sitting here at a cottage window, that the world is having its daily crisis, that billions are being lost, that oil prices are yet higher, and it is all the subject of pressing chatter on the Internet.

Here, life just goes on, paced by blooming lupines, the scent of freshly mowed grass and the distant sound of seagulls. From our windows I see the quaint little cottages of Bayside in one direction and a sweep down Penobscot Bay in another. Maine weather is a bit like the stock market - moments of crystal clarity followed by days and maybe weeks of unrelenting fog.

It would be really easy for me to trot out yet another story of real estate misery. From Boothbay Harbor to Stockton Springs, the landscape seems to have sprouted an overflow crop of "For Sale" signs. Asking prices have come down, but they are still well over what people who actually work for a living can afford. One resident observes we might see more signs, if many sellers hadn't taken their houses off the market.

But I will spare you that story. There is also a more positive, if subtle, message here. It is this. Some people would have us focus on loss. We in media-land excel at that.

But if we focus on loss, we'll miss seeing the things that are not lost, but restored. We'll also miss the things that are reinvented, rather than restored. Here's an example from this little stretch of midcoast Maine.

On June 19, the Republican Journal, the weekly paper of Belfast, said it and five other weekly newspapers in the midcoast area were being bought by Village Net Media Inc., an affiliate of www.villagesoup.com. The goal will be to weave together the Internet platform of Village Soup with the print circulation of small newspapers that can trace their history back well over a century. This is the technology version of your basic man-bites-dog story.

Small newspapers have been threatened with extinction before. In the late '60s small newspapers were dying because of costs, primarily the incredible burden of setting hot type. Then Boston inventor William Garth invented a small and inexpensive phototypesetting machine. A small newspaper could switch to phototypesetting for an investment of about $5,000 in one of the machines Garth's company, Compugraphic, manufactured. Later, linking computers to phototypesetters eliminated redundant keyboarding and improved the economics of small papers still more.

Through the '70s and '80s there was much media hand-wringing over the decline of newspaper circulations. The decline, however, was limited to major metropolitan papers; small weeklies and dailies enjoyed healthy circulation increases. Will Village Soup-like changes slow or stop the current decline of traditional newspapers? I don't know. Recently, major newspaper stocks like The Washington Post, New York Times and Gannett were off 26 percent, 38 percent and 59 percent, respectively, over the last 12 months. The stock market is predicting a quick death.

This may be a lousy time to own shares of legacy newspaper companies, but it's a great time for communication. Never has so much been possible. Reinvention trumps loss.

As for the market, I don't mean to sound cavalier but, well, it's only money.

It only dimly shows what we can do.

scott@scottburns.com