BostonNOW Is Now Gone Due To Krumbling Krona

The free daily newspaper BostonNOW has now folded, according to a report in the Boston Herald and a subsequent story in the Associate Press.

The original concept of the newspaper included seamless merging of blog content. In reality, very little original blog content was included -- and that process was far from from seamless.

The worst part of the way BostonNOW designed the blog content was that they required all blogs to be created on their website, rather than through a hyperlinking method to the blog's own website. All that blog content across the web couldn't be used unless the blogger created a duplicate blog over at BostonNOW. With the paper's demise, people who created blogs from scratch on the paper's website (yeah, both of those guys), may now risk losing all their old content. I once, nonetheless, created a blog there using their useful tool -- a single button that would import all of the postings from an existing blogger blog elsewhere on the web -- but haven't bothered with that parallel blog ever since.

My first experience with a BostonNOW reporter wasn't awful. He was writing a story duplicating my blog post on possible alternative uses for three houses now owned by Boston College. Why couldn't they just run my blog post instead? Wasn't that the idea for the newspaper's blog content? Also, since they were reporting on the possibly historic nature of the houses, why couldn't they look up that they are all three listed on the National Register of Historic Places? Anyway, the experience could've been worse.

The newspaper carries a high opinion of itself, as evidenced by its press release posted over at the Boston Phoenix's "Media Log" blog:

BostonNOW’s editorial content, especially its strong local reporting, has been picked up dozens of times by Boston’s paid dailies and TV outlets. The Economist magazine lauded BostonNOW in January as one of the finest free dailies in the United States.

I'm not sure the paper's readers -- or those who went to great lengths to avoid being the paper's readers -- would necessarily agree, nor would their vocal critics. To their credit, though, BostonNOW did get the story of the how the MBTA is broke before the Boston Globe did. To their detriment, they ran the story of Senator Barack Obama maybe defeating Senator Hillary Clinton the day after the New Hampshire Democratic primary.

The reason for the paper folding? The owners are in Iceland and have been suffering from a collapsing Icelandic currency relative to the U.S. dollar -- which itself has been collapsing relative to the euro. In short, a krona fire sale on Iceland. I wonder if anyone will produce a kronology of the kollapse? Clearly prone to hyperbole, the paper's press release claims that the Icelandic krona has "has declined over 20% against the dollar since January." Looking at the Wall Street Journal's numbers, however, it looks more like a 15.5% decline to me. (Alternatively stated, the dollar has increased in value by 18.3% relative to the kronar.) Close enough?

Even though it's a free daily, a hard copy of today's paper might actually be worth something on Ebay -- in dollars, not krona, of course.

Best headlines -- although they miss the U/L case for the newspaper's name:
UniversalHub: "Call It Boston Then"
Boston Phoenix Media Log: "Boston Now Is Boston Then"


BostonNOW Hard Hitting Stories Yet to be Written

The online version of BostonNOW has been -- for several months! -- looking for citizen journalists to earn $16 to 40 writing a story for the free daily paper. Here's their ad:



Hmmmm... I wonder. Is March 3rd one of the "best dates"? October 22nd? Or is John Smith the best date? Jane Doe? Maybe they should look at the Phoenix's classifieds?

Oh, I get it now. They mean where to go on a date! Damn, I'm stupid.

BostonNOW Story on Language Used on BC Sports Fans Websites

The free daily, BostonNOW, has picked up the story, first reported here on the Brighton Centered Blog, of anti-Semitic and misogynistic comments posted on two online discussion boards devoted to Boston College athletics.

The BostonNOW story includes statements from Jack Dunn, Director of Public Affairs at BC, and Bobby Burton, editor-in-chief of one of the websites (rivals.com):

BC spokesman Jack Dunn said disciplinary actions will be taken against the posters if they are current members of the university's community. BC police is handling the investigation, he said, but would involve Boston police if necessary.

Rivals editor-in-chief said his company does the best it can to stay on top of the postings.

"We monitor and moderate the message boards and try to eliminate any items that violate the terms of service," Bobby Burton said.

He said he has not yet heard from any University officials about the matter.

"From a Rivals perspective, if there is anti-Semitic jargon, it would be grounds for dismissal from the site and it should be deleted," Burton said.

"Anything threatening, frankly."

The story does not, however, quote any official from scout.com, which is where the most inflammatory content was posted -- and where the BC discussion boards, Eagle Insider, have now been converted from free to paid subscriber-only status, along with a pledge to clean up the content.  The Eagle Insider board administrator stated yesterday that reporters had been "badgering" the scout.com Vice President.

Picture ThisNOW: New City Councilors Sworn In, Then Cropped Out

BostonNOW isn't having a good week.

First, their printed paper being distributed mid-morning today has a cover title, "Obama's big day / High turnout among independents could be his key in N.H." Oops. Senator Hillary Clinton beat Senator Barack Obama in yesterday's New Hampshire Democratic primary, but that final result appears to have come in too late for BostonNOW's publication deadline. The print edition distributed later in the morning appears to have a different cover -- fortunately about Senator John McCain's big day, not former Governor Mitt Romney's.

The Obama-gaffe was preceded by a story in yesterday's BostonNOW about the swearing-in ceremony for the Boston City Councilors at Faneuil Hall Monday. Noting that the Council "welcomed two new members: John Connolly and Mark Ciommo of Allston-Brighton," BostonNOW ran an accompanying photo -- then proceeded to crop both new councilors out of the photo. Maybe this is a freshman councilor hazing stunt by the media?

In the photo -- or, more properly, out-of-the-photo -- Councilor Connolly is in the front-row off-camera to the right; Councilor Ciommo is in the back-row, also off-camera to the right. The Boston Globe ran a picture with all the councilors on page B1 of Tuesday's paper.

Let's hope the two new City Councilors get treated better when assigning them office space.

BostonNOW: Blog Use Not All Its Cracked Up to Be

Earlier this year, BostonNOW burst on the local newspaper scene with an innovative approach: integrating blog content directly into the online and print versions of the paper. And paying the bloggers, too.

Now that they've been up and running for a few months, I think it's a good time to ask: Is their new concept of integrated blog content working?

The publisher's answer: sort-of yes, sort-of no. The Boston Herald reports that the editor-in-chief has lost his job, although he'll "continue to work on 'the blog side' of the business as a consultant." A letter from the former editor, John Wilpers, says that they are still trying to figure out how to reimburse bloggers.

My answer: no, it's not working very well.

I base my position on:

1. an unimpressive experience with having them pick up a blog entry of mine last month;
   
2. idiotic policy requiring duplicate blogs;
3. unclear instructions for suggesting blog entries to be included in their paper; and
   
4. printed content so short that it barely qualifies as newsworthy.
   

My Experience: Part I

On July 9, I blogged on two alternatives that Boston College should consider for the three houses at 188/192/196 Foster Street. BC wants to raze all three houses; I suggested they consider building around them or moving them. Fair enough. Not breaking news, but ideas worth talking about.

A BostonNOW reporter, who either reads my blog or monitors an aggregated feed (like UniversalHub or outside.in), contacted me about their interest in running the post. OK, you have my permission, run it. No, that's not what they wanted -- he asked me a few questions in order to put together a story himself. All right. Oh, and he wanted to get a photo of the house(s) with me in front of it(them). OK. We made the arrangements, he took the photo, etc.

How was my blog going to fit in to this? Isn't including blog content the niche for BostonNOW? I was told that, in order for any blog entry to be included in the paper, I must create an entirely new blog on the BostonNOW website. I could just copy over my existing blog entry verbatim, or write something different, etc. But it had to be a blog on their website.

I proceeded to do just that. They have a neat tool that will upload everything from your blogger.com blog automatically. It uploaded all my posts, the drafts of future posts, the labels -- everything. Nice and smooth.

I notified BostonNOW's reporter the post was on their website, but nothing out of the blog post made it into the July 11, 2007 print edition or the online BostonNOW Blogger Roundup for the day. (The print edition wasn't even delivered to newsboxes in the Brighton Center area that day.) They just wrote a story using my blog post as a starting point, and that was it. No blog content anywhere to be found, despite the fact that I wasted an hour or two setting up a mirror blog on their site and uploading content to it.


My Experience: Part II

Not completely discouraged, I tried a new tact: let's post some "local news" on my blog on the BostonNOW website, and see if they pick it up. Now that we're in campaign season for the open A-B District City Council seat, I asked every candidate if they supported or opposed Boston College's proposal to site two undergraduate dormitories on the former St. John's Seminary land recently purchased by BC. The neighborhood is totally opposed to this proposal, and all of the candidates stated their opposition to it, too. Not Earth-shattering, but a clear indication of a neighborhood rising up in vocal unison against a particular institutional expansion proposal. (The BC dormitory story is, in general, a big one: the Boston Globe ran it on the front page back in June.)

I uploaded the story to my mirrored blog on the BostonNOW website. It immediately showed up in their sidebar of new blog stories under "local news" (how I tagged it). In fact, it stayed there for a long, long time. There weren't other "local news" blog entries popping up to bump it down the stack. There aren't that many active bloggers on the BostonNOW website, and very few of them label their posts as "local news."

Look at the current "local news" blog entries at BostonNOW. When I wrote this there were only six entries in the last two days, eight in the last four days; inspection of them shows that half or so are crackpots, duplication of other newspaper's content, or written by someone at BostonNOW. That's it, two-a-day or fewer.

It's immediately obvious that BostonNOW's awful hurdle -- requiring bloggers to create altogether new blogs on BostonNOW's website -- has resulted in very little blog content being posted there. They are failing at being a clearing-house of local news blog content, such that they cannot rely on it for any significant portion of their day-to-day news content.

Unsure if they would pick up this blog entry to include in the paper (or the online version), I thought: How do I inform the editors that there might be a local news blog story on their website? There's no button to push on the "blog dashboard" (or account management page), no links anywhere I could find, etc. All I could find was an old page, written right around the time they launched the paper, with an email address for the editors to send them blog content. They created this page when their site wasn't fully functional. So I sent email to the black hole and never heard back.

The blog post never made it into their print or online version. It died there. RIP.


Brief Blog Content

One problem BostonNOW has in using its blog content is that they opt for very, very short stories. On everything. A few stories will get a half-page or a few paragraphs, but many of their articles are just briefs containing exactly two sentences.

I went through the August 8, 2007 print edition to look at how they used the blog content. Eleven blog entries total 27 paragraphs. That's 2-and-a-half paragraphs per entry. About half of them read like letters-to-the-editor, rather than news or op-ed. The other half were entertainment, sports, or gadgets.

The newspaper is just not much of a read. Their stories are so brief it's hard even to get the sketchiest outline of an issue. I can't imagine how shallow I would be relying on it daily for my news... er, well, how much shallower I would be.


Why is BostonNOW Not Succeeding in Using Blog Content?

More than anything else, their model of requiring users to create a blog on their website is probably driving 90% of their blog content away. Boston is the bloggiest city in the country, yet they can't seem to get more than two "local news" blog postings a day. BostonNOW needs to revise their policy so that they can use a far broader array of blog content.

The paper also doesn't have a clear way for people who think they have good content to notify the editors, or fast-track it onto the site. Partnering with outside.in, or with Adam Gaffin of UniversalHub, would be a good way to ensure local and/or quality content on a daily basis.

Finally, the paper strives to include mostly short stories or blurbs, often only two sentences or two paragraphs. BostonNOW is a little of a lot of things, but a lot of nothing. They should instead focus on fewer stories. Only then will they have content that people want to read -- and can't get anywhere else in print. Think Boston Phoenix, but without the masseuse ads.


Oh, and by the way, those BostonNOW guys seem to have gotten into a bit of a sticky mess over covering -- or creating -- a news story related to how Ron Jeremy's bus got banged-up.

Former BC Linebacker May Be Indicted Soon

BostonNOW reports that former Boston College linebacker, Ray Henderson, "is expected to be indicted this week on a variety of drug charges, prosecutors said yesterday."

Details on his arrest were given here in a previous post.


UPDATE (8/10): He has been indicted, according to the Boston Herald:

Originally from Cresskill, N.J., Henderson, who amassed 263 tackles and nine interceptions in 49 games, has been jailed for seven weeks.

Boston police executed a search warrant at Henderson’s home May 17 and he was arrested. He posted $5,000 cash bail, only to be stopped for speeding on June 25. Police said they found cocaine on Henderson then, too. His bail was revoked.

Keady: "Those three houses will be coming down"

Will Boston College consider options other than razing the three houses at 188/192/196 Foster Street?

Thomas Keady, Jr., Boston College's Vice President for Government and Community Relations, offered a subtle answer to the newspaper BostonNOW:

The college made it plain: preservation for the more than century old structures it owns is not in the plans.

"I don't believe that they are [historically significant]," said BC spokesman Tom Keady. "Those three houses will be coming down."

And he huffed, and he puffed, and he... well, actually, I think they use wrecking balls these days.