To update:
The site I wrote about above was moved to a new host (a wordpress based host) from an install on a cheaper brand of hosting. On this wordpress based host, I have another site – that was originally installed on this wordpress host – that I was also looking to switch to Newspaper theme and tried to do so. On this website the theme works fine. The TagDiv Social Counter plugin doesn’t cause any issues, all images display fine. The cloud templates work great. They load and let me edit them in the editor.

So I started doing a lot of tests with the other website that was having problems with the hosting company helping me. I made everything the same – theme, plugins, etc. and one website worked fine, and one kept giving me issues.

I can only deduce that something was corrupted during the move from one host to another, or something on the old host was causing errors and that problem transferred to the new host when the site was moved.

I have made a brand new install of wordpress and added newspaper and am in the process of importing the posts and pages I need from the site, and then will make this site live, replacing the corrupted version.

It works fine now.

My apologies to the Newspaper team as my frustration boiled over and the problem seems to have been with a cheap host/corrupted wordpress files, NOT the theme.

My webhost was looking into it, and said to ask you about this error that it showed in the error logs.

[Tue Jan 29 15:44:25.273406 2019] [lsapi:error] [pid 8687:tid 140388804560640] [client 208.100.3.216:54329] [host http://www.oilpaintingwithethan.com] Backend fatal error: PHP Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /home/insidemy/domains/oilpaintingwithethan.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/Newspaper/includes/wp_booster/td_remote_cache.php:102\nStack trace:\n#0 /home/insidemy/domains/oilpaintingwithethan.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/td-social-counter/td_social_api.php(62): td_remote_cache::set(‘td_social_api’, ‘facebook_oilpai…’, 878, 10800)\n#1 /home/insidemy/domains/oilpaintingwithethan.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/td-social-counter/shortcode/td_block_social_counter.php(172): td_social_api->get_social_counter(‘facebook’, ‘oilpaintingwith…’, ”)\n#2 /home/insidemy/domains/oilpaintingwithethan.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/td-social-counter/shortcode/td_block_social_counter.php(112): td_block_social_counter->get_social_network_meta(‘facebook’, ‘oilpaintingwith…’, Object(td_social_api), ”)\n#3 /home/insidemy/domains/oilpaintingwithethan.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/Newspaper/includes/wp_booster/td_block_widget.php(424): td_block_social_count in /home/insidemy/domains/oilpaintingwithethan.com/public_html/wp-content/themes/Newspaper/includes/wp_booster/td_remote_cache.php on line 102\n