[S]tephen Baker lived for newspapers. As a boy, he fetched them from the train with his father, the founder of Brattleboro’s one and only newsstand. As a businessman, he delivered them to southern Vermont merchants through the family’s media distribution company. And in his later years, he left a stack of them outside the newsstand when closed on holidays with a sign that said to take one today and pay for it tomorrow.
But when Baker died Saturday at age 86, his three sons faced a challenge. The Brattleboro Reformer doesn’t publish on Sundays, and with Monday being the Fourth of July, the first chance to submit an obituary was Tuesday for publication Wednesday.
Chris Palermo understands the plight. As president of the Vermont Funeral Directors Association, he has seen newspapers charge for what used to be a free service, only to now cut back on the opportunities for death notices to appear on scrapbook-friendly pages.
This week, for example, the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus stopped printing on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays as a cost-saving measure, offering only online versions until the papers return to stores and front steps Thursdays through Sundays.
“If you had sought input from advertisers and funeral directors prior to making this decision to block out three consecutive days of print publication,” Palermo wrote to the papers’ management, “you would have heard that from our perspective this is too dramatic a change for many of our clients; that there are many people who do not get their information from online resources and that this seismic shift will most likely (affect) how families choose to publish obituaries.”
In response, Editor-in-Chief Rob Mitchell emailed Palermo that the papers have “fielded hundreds of calls” but “also have to face the fact that if we don’t change, we will inevitably fade away.”
And so families like Baker’s and funeral directors like Palermo — owner of Perkins-Parker Funeral Home in Waterbury — are having to figure out new ways to publicize the most personal of news.
Perkins-Parker Funeral Home has a website and Facebook page and posts its obituaries on the national online aggregator www.legacy.com. But while welcoming nearly a half-million internet visitors in the past year, Palermo knows many people who attend funerals aren’t plugged into technology.
“Not all the older generation reads their news online,” he said. “I’m 60 years old. I get the Burlington Free Press and was getting The Times Argus every day. Perhaps I’m too old school, but I think this is going to be a difficult transition for the families we serve.”
Palermo said he is considering reallocating some ad dollars from his local paper into daily Free Press notices directing people to his website. The fact the Herald and Times Argus are promising to print all Monday through Wednesday online obituaries in Thursday’s papers doesn’t appease him.
“I’m wondering if we’re going to reach people in time to let them know about services,” he said.
Hinesburg lawyer Roger Kohn hopes such concerns will call attention to www.VermontObits.org, a free website he launched two years ago after the Free Press shrank from a broadsheet to its current tabloid size.
“It became obvious to me that a lot of people were not subscribing to newspapers anymore,” Kohn said, “and there were serious questions about whether papers would continue.”
VermontObits.org lets people post and view obituaries without charge or length constraints.
In a news release announcing the venture in 2014, Kohn wrote that he expected it to become the primary source for viewing obituaries in Vermont.
That hasn’t happened. Search the site for Baker’s obituary, for example, and you won’t find any from Windham County. Even so, “I think the site is more important than ever,” its creator said. “It’s very expensive to publish an obituary in a newspaper. It’s really a question of getting people to know this site exists.”
In the meantime, customers at Baker’s newsstand Wednesday could finally buy a Reformer with the longtime co-owner’s obituary.
“Time will tell how all of this will play out, but there’s a fair amount of consternation,” Palermo said. “We have one opportunity to celebrate a person’s life, and we want to do it as best we can.”
