Unfortunately, about the time it seems Berlin is scoring a hit, it gets hit instead. Main Street is the heart of the downtown, and residents have been working hard to improve it. The last thing it needs is one more empty building. But Morning Lane Photography, owned and operated by Paul Charest, is shutting its doors. Mr. Charest said one of the hardest things to do was to write “Going out of business” on the windows. He said he apologized to the surrounding business owners before he wrote it. He is trying to sell the building too.
Mr. Charest said he thinks photography isn’t going to be viable in the long term. Too many changes with digital, now everyone is a photographer.
As I stood talking to him I felt the weight of my Nikon D200 on my shoulder. It, and the newer versions of it, are exactly what he was talking about. It is smarter than me when it comes to taking pictures and makes most of them come out well.
Of course it and I are not immune to the forces he talked about. My D200 three years old and already is obsolete. And I am writing for a newspaper, another medium that might soon fall by the wayside. I understand his frustration and his exasperation. I live it just as he does.
And just as Berlin does. This is exactly what this blog is about: Change. Berlin in changing. What will the city do about it? Journalism is changing. What will reporters, the public and society do about it? And photography is changing. What will Paul Charest do about it?
Paul is doing something about it. He admitted that it was hard to close a business after 21 years, a business he’d put countless hours into, but he’s training to become an X-Ray tech. He is moving forward, looking to what he can do to keep himself afloat. He said he’s excited to be able to spend time with his family, to take advantage of not being a photographer.

Has Berlin taken advantage of not being a mill town? Has journalism taken advantage of not being confined to print? Berlin and journalism: to entities rooted in trees. What will it take to move beyond them?
For Berlin at least, salvation lies in technology. City councilors are always complaining about not having a highway to Berlin. Why? So Berlin can wind up like Gorham on U.S. Route 16 just south of the city line, a corridor of low-rise big box stores with low wage jobs? If Wal-Mart and Tractor Supply Co. are the best of Berlin’s future the city is aiming too low. There are better opportunities out there for the city and its residents.
New highways are made of fiber optic cable, not pavement. If credit card companies can reroute telephone calls to Bangalore on cable laid across the Pacific, it shouldn’t be hard to run cable to Berlin. More and more people in Berlin are using the Internet. More and more people are creating careers for themselves while living in beautiful rural settings like Northern New Hampshire. The city has to facilitate that process and work to get city wide wireless, not pave over its historic buildings.
What else does the city need to do? The same thing Mr. Charest did — get an education. The job landscape isn’t changing in Berlin, it has changed. For a city with a blue collar mindset, there aren’t many blue collar jobs left. Even positions at the prison are easier to get if you have a college degree. Residents have a wonderful resource in the White Mountain Community Center; it would behoove them to use it.
Everyone could use more education, but Berlin is used to the work harder model, not the work smarter model. Residents have to get over that and learn all the things they don’t know. It is possible to do some jobs from anywhere, but it means knowing how to do those jobs. Berlin residents need to get an education in 21st century careers, because the ones that sustained them in the 20th century are gone forever. They are living in change, and they must decide if it will be a good change or a bad one.

In some ways Berlin is leading the nation. I work for a newspaper that doesn’t exist in Berlin. Or anywhere for that matter. I am a backpack reporter, journalist 2.0.

The Berlin Reporter building is being turned into a restaurant by some hardworking people willing to take a chance investing in real estate in a city hopefully on the backside of a depression. I never worked in that building. Neither did my predecessor. I work from my car, from my cell phone, and from poached internet around the region.
When the city manager called me the other day he asked where I was. He assumed my 207 telephone number meant I was calling from Maine. And why shouldn’t he – no other local newspaper has an out of state number. But I don’t have an office, so my cell phone becomes my office.
Some days, when I’m trying to drum up stories, this arrangement is challenge. I often track back and forth from the community college campus to meetings and interviews because the college is the best place I can find to work that has Internet. No one minds if I hang out all day, making appointments and phone calls and writing stories.
I got a job in Berlin because the population of the city does not rely on the Internet sufficiently to close the newspapers. The Reporter and the daily paper both succeed while newspapers nationwide are folding. They aren’t really threatened by the Internet. Try to find a car on Craigslist in Berlin. They are there, but without the critical mass that makes Craigslist viable in other cities. Try for a Google News search to find out what’s going on in Berlin. There are stories, usually about the prison, but not the sort of coverage people expect and get in other places.
Berlin is disconnected. The distance between Berlin and Gorham is probably greater than the distance between Gorham and Concord. It is hard to imagine if you don’t spend a lot of time in the area, but if you ask the city council they know it. People forget about the city and have a hard time understanding its idiosyncrasies.

The people of Berlin are among the hardest workers I’ve ever met. They cling to their blue collar roots, which at times is a hindrance, but it is a city with a work ethic. Years of the promise of mill jobs trained people if they worked hard they would be successful. As industry has evaporated, however, this maxim no longer holds true. Industriousness is no longer enough, and the infrastructure isn’t there for other avenues to success.
Part of that missing infrastructure is high speed Internet. Berlin has the only public library I’ve been to in recent years without wireless Internet. There is also no Internet cafe in town. People don’t have the same connectivity as they do elsewhere, and that is a threat to their economy.
I used to live in Portland, Maine, where I met my wife and went to college. In the time I lived there I went from hating computers and connectivity to working and living through Apple products. Almost every building in the city has wireless Internet. It is easy to be a freelancer or employed at an online business. When my wife and I moved to the Conway area it was a shock how much different it was. Most of our friends are college educated, and most of them own computers. But many of them went to town to the library or the local cafe to do their web surfing. Sasha and I have uber-high speed wireless at our house and would be hard pressed to continue our professional lives without it. It was a transition to get used to people who worked in a different paradigm.
Then I got a job in Berlin. If the initial Conway shock was a tremor, Berlin was an the earthquake. There is no Internet cafe, no wireless at the library. The NHWorks office and the community college offer connectivity, but the community is not set up for the twenty-first century worker. The desire to draw those people to the community is there, but not the infrastructure.
A friend asked if Berlin could be an artists community in the same way Deer Isle is in Maine. I think it could be — it is beautiful, with inexpensive property for sale that could be easily renovated into studio space. These people don’t need much except inspiratirational surroundings and a quiet place to work. Berlin has a wealth of both. But they do need a way to get products to market; this is where Berlin is lacking.
Councilor Lafleur raised this point at the last city council meeting. He said the state needs to pave a highway to the city to increase its economic viability.
I disagree. That is twentieth century thinking, based on twentieth century technology. Relying on the internal combustion and cheap gasoline is not the way to ensure long-term economic success. Like building a biomass facility in the center of town, this is a solution for the last hundred years, and a mistake for the next hundred.
Instead the city should look to the Internet as its method of connection. There is no need to pave a highway to the downtown. In fact it would ruin many of the valuable assets the city has. Instead, the city should preserve its heritage, its buildings and its aesthetic. The twenty-first century highway is the information super-highway. This is where the city should put its energy and its lobbying efforts.
How do I know this will work? The Berlin Reporter already proved it does. I am an employee for a paper no longer in the community. I work twenty-first century style, commuting more miles over the Internet than I do in my car. The challenge is that Berlin is so poorly set up for this type of work. It is does not have the infrastructure to handle more workers like me. It needs to implement Internet 3.0 now to step into this century.

As it is, I am a backpack journalist working for print media. The only thing about this solution is it might put me out of a job.